Return of the Open Primary: A Midnight Miracle
In the dead of night last week, Sen. Abel Maldonado managed to pull off an incredible coup: getting a two thirds vote to place the open primary on the June 2010 ballot in exchange for his vote on the budget. In the light of day partisans of all stripes are howling their heads off, but it too late. The measure is on the ballot.
A little history. In 1996 voters enacted an open primary constitutional amendment that allowed all voters to vote for all candidates for each partisan office in the primary. The parties hated this, and sued in federal court. In 2000, the US Supreme Court declared the California open primary unconstitutional as a violation of “parties associational rights” (whatever they are) because Republicans could help choose the Democratic nominee for office, and vice versa.
But the court left a loophole. If you did not have party nominees, you could have a “blanket” open primary. The state of Washington had long had the blanket primary, and to meet the Supreme Court mandate, Washington in 2004 enacted a blanket primary, top-two runoff with no party nominees. (Candidates can show that they “prefer” a party). This new law was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2007 and Washington used it for the first time in 2008.
Say It Ain’t So, Joe.
Joe Mathews–you can’t possibly believe that without the two-thirds vote requirement to raise taxes, California taxpayers would not be buried under even more taxes than they already are. Just because the state is in difficult shape living under a two-thirds vote requirement doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be in worse shape without it.
Yesterday, Mathews took on my column of last week in which I defended the two-thirds vote against coming challenges. My point was to focus the two-thirds vote argument on raising taxes.
A two-thirds vote for the budget would allow the majority party to set priorities. If this debate were simply about the budget my concern would not be as high. But we all know that the goal to create more programs and grow government can’t simply be accomplished by budget votes. The power to tax is essential to the goal setting and that’s what this debate comes down to.
Why the Open Primary is Worse Than Bad
It is said, philosophically, that there are no new thoughts, no unexplored concepts – just new ways of expressing what has been previously thought. That is the historical equivalent of saying that History repeats itself only in different detail.
You see, for nearly as long as there has been representative government, people have gravitated toward factions or parties. We know England once had Whigs and Tories and is now dominated by a Labour Party and a Conservative Party. For the pre-Renaissance Florentines, there were the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. In time, the Ghibellines were driven out and the city was dominated by the Guelfs who, unable to live with success, internally feuded and brought partisanship to a new height with the formation of White Guelfs and their sworn adversaries: the Black Guelfs – so stark can be the differences of partisanship.
Leaving Economics to the Economists, Not the Politicians
Politicians explaining economics to the general populace is like having baseball stars explain theoretical physics for the masses (or, A-Rod, explaining the joys of natural foods to baseball fans). There is nothing simple or sound bite-sized, or easily understandable, about the complex tangle of interwoven threads that make up the current economic crisis – the fact that the world’s most gifted economists, people who have spent their life toiling in that vineyard, are having real trouble getting their collective arms around exactly what needs to be done to fix a painfully obviously, broken economic system, should tell us something about the presentation of economics issues for the average layperson by the average politician.
Most people are on the level of having trouble balancing their checkbooks. Indeed, dare I say in this era of on-line banking, most people don’t even balance their checkbooks anymore at all. We use calculators instead of all the fun math some of us stayed awake in class and listened to, back when, and we don’t even have to remember telephone numbers anymore because our snappy cell/PDA/smartphones remember hundreds of numbers so well that we are now totally divorced from that aspect of our memories. Is it any wonder, therefore, that, when faced with an implosion of our financial institutions and world economies, which some have compared to the Great Depression of the 30’s, that few, if any, can really follow the economics issued presented?