Rubber? Meet Road.
One of the most important policy debates of the decade is about to commence in California – several years after the policy was enacted.
Yesterday, the Air Resources Board released the Climate Change Draft Scoping Plan, the most important document to date discussing implementation of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. While labeled a “discussion draft,” it begins to lay out the nuts and bolts of how the Schwarzenegger Administration would have Californians reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The document still only hints at the costs involved:
The Redistricting Discourse Carries On
Joe Mathews dismisses my analysis that the redistricting initiative might pass with all the usual arguments as to why past measures lost: support by good government reformers and the media is irrelevant; the public doesn’t care, it’s biggest booster, Gov. Schwarzenegger, is unpopular, etc. etc.
Joe is pretty much like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day, and this may be his hour. If the politics of the past is prologue, he is right — it will lose.
So what’s different? Joe points to “good government” and media support for Schwarzenegger’s Proposition 77 in the 2005 special election. But Prop 77 got caught in the maelstrom that sunk it along with the three other initiatives on the ballot. It did call for an immediate election in the new lines that was interpreted (by me among others), as an attempted Republican power grab. These problems will not plague the 2008 initiative.
The Supreme Court and Presidential Politics
The Supreme Court became a political football…again… with its 5 to 4 decision stating that an individual’s right to bear arms is constitutional. Even though Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama generally accepted the court’s decision, there will be plenty of advocates in his party who will argue that one Supreme Court appointee of a President Obama could reverse this decision in the near future.
Of course, on the other hand, this issue is one that may bring uncertain conservatives to finally embrace the McCain campaign using the same logic that one vote could change the result.
Thus, the Supreme Court’s right to bear arms decision will join the abortion issue as partisans try to use potential Supreme Court appointments as a persuasive debating point in trying to sway voters.