One Place Where Education Shouldn’t Be The Top Priority

Here’s a fact I learned during the state’s recent (and unfortunately somewhat ongoing budget crisis and cash crunch): When cash runs short, other states pay their bondholders – the people they’ve borrowed money from – back first. But not California.

Here bondholders are second in the priority of payments. Education is first.

Proud? Don’t be. It’d be better for public services, for the state – and perhaps even for education – if we reversed the two priorities.

Why? At a Zocalo Public Square event I moderated last month in Los Angeles, Peter Taylor, managing director in the public finance department at Barclays Capital, explained that California’s priority payments probably hurts our credit rating a little. So we pay a little bit more to borrow for the privilege of putting education first. The extra money we pay to borrow would be better spent on more public services, including education.

Legislator Shish Kabob

Even a guy like me, living on the west side of Los Angeles in the shadow of a government-run art museum currently running an exhibit by contemporary Germans (LACMA), has gotten the news that California conservatives are sticking to their principles in these dark times and opposing things that would bring our society to ruin. Those evils are: European socialism. Governor Schwarzenegger. President Obama. Bailouts. Those gay people who are conservative enough to want to marry. And anyone who negotiates with Democrats.

I’ve been critical of this kind of thinking in this space. I believe I called it cult-like. But the Fullerton rally this weekend shook me up. What people! What power! What principle! And so I’ve been thinking things over, and now I’m sure I got it wrong. I apologize.

So go ahead, conservatives. It’s now or never. Stop the big spending socialists. Keep saying no. Stick to your principles. In fact, take those principle sticks and put some heads on ‘em.

You want to recall the legislators who voted for the budget deal? Recall them.

Spending Limit and the Orient Express

The early, private polling I’ve seen is all over the map on Prop 1A, the new spending limit. Much depends on how the complicated limit is described – and on the nature of the opposition to the measure.

But common sense indicates the limit faces a steeply uphill fight. Why? The measure has bitter enemies everywhere – among liberals who hate any limit on spending, among conservatives who hate that the limit is linked to taxes, among anyone who hates the legislature (a solid majority in California) and even among pointy-headed centrists who won’t like the details of the limit as they learn them. One imagines that even the legislative leaders who negotiated it won’t shed a tear if Prop 1A goes down. The Democrats didn’t want it, and it was less than the hard spending cap that Republicans pined for. If the limit goes down, everyone could be a suspect, even politicians who endorsed it.

Report on Prop. 8 Hearing

The Folks Who Got Married Last Year Will Stay Married.

That, at least, seems a safe bet after watching this morning’s oral arguments in the California Supreme Court.

It was hard to tell from the court’s questions whether Prop 8 itself will be overturned. But the exchange between the justices and the Ken Starr, the attorney defending Prop 8, over the question of whether the approximately 18,000 same-sex couples who married last year should have those marriages invalidated was much, much clearer.

A majority of justices — including Carol Corrigan, who voted against last year’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage — expressed deep skepticism at Starr’s argument that such marriages must be thrown out. It felt like a smackdown, actually.

The Trouble with Ballot Titles and Summaries

It’s bad enough that California law permits the attorney general — an elected, partisan official — to write the official titles and summaries for ballot initiatives that qualify from the ballot. Most of the time, at least, the a.g. is independent of the initiative sponsor. But when it comes to measures that are placed on the ballot by the legislature itself, lawmakers themselves get to write the official summaries. And they don’t have a good record of being honest with the public.

The latest example is Prop 1A, the spending limit measure that was part of last week’s budget deal and will appear on the May 19 special election ballot. The legislature’s official description of the measure omits the very important fact that if the measure passes, temporary tax increases in the budget deal will last longer.

Roger Rabbit and Me

Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

Valiant: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon – for this freeway? I don’t get it.

Doom: (smugly) Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off. Off and on. All day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly-prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

Convention Founders Really Want Legislative Reform, Not a Convention

After sitting through Tuesday’s five-and-a-half-hour, standing-room only summit on the possibility of a California constitutional convention, I came away with two strong impressions.

1.    A constitutional convention, while it would be difficult and dangerous, is something California should do. There is so much frustration with the status quo here, and so many different ideas about how to fix things, that we need a top-to-bottom review of our state constitution. We need to pare back the convention (it runs more than 150 pages), and look at all three branches – the legislative, executive and judicial.

2.    The Bay Area Council and other good government groups, in their heart of hearts, don’t really want a constitutional convention. They want legislative reform – changes in how laws are made, budgets are passed, and lawmakers are elected.

Gubernatorial Primary Prequel: The Special Election

What’s the real opponent of the package of budget deal ballot measures in the May special election?

The 2010 governor’s race.

The package is an unsightly, unpleasant group of measures put together by an unpopular governor and an irresponsible legislature that deserves little respect. (And I say that as someone who has been consistently supportive of passing the package). Politically, the package makes an irresistible target for every single person running for governor of California.

Look for those candidates – Republicans and Democrats – to compete with each other in the fury and frequency of their denunciations of the package and the budget deal that spawned it.

Two Thirds: California Republicans and the Stockholm Syndrome

Joel Fox, a native New Englander, channeled Paul Revere on this site to warn of the coming invasion of Democrats and others seeking to overturn the state’s requirement of a two-thirds vote in the legislature before a budget may be passed or taxes raised.

I have to laugh whenever I hear Fox and other Republicans and anti-tax activists praise two thirds. Their logic is simply ridiculous. These are the folks who tell us over and over that California has gone to hell, that taxes are too high and that spending is out of control. Then they tell us that if we don’t protect the two-thirds requirement, taxes will be too high and spending will be out of control.

(Yes, you may scratch your head now.)
Which is it, guys?

The reality is that the two-thirds requirement is at the heart of the system that they denounce. Californian legislatures have operated under the two-thirds requirement for budgets since the 1930s and the two-thirds requirement for taxes since Prop 13 passed in 1978. And it is this two-thirds system that has produced the taxes and spending they complain about.

Needed: A Geekier Campaign

This is still the newborn stage of Meg Whitman’s political career. And career transitions are always tough. But I’m disappointed with how she launched her gubernatorial bid.

I don’t have any particularly problem with what she said in interviews with the LA Times and NBC’s Today show. Most of it was boiler plate. I even thought it was a tiny bit brave, for a Republican running in a closed Republican primary, to offer a complex position on gay marriage (she’s against it but for protecting the marriages of those who married lawfully last year – which Republicans should understand as respect for the rule of law – and for adoption by gay couples, a moral imperative in a world with too many parentless or unwanted children).