Special Sessions, Here We Come
The Legislature didn’t finish a water plan before adjourning the regular legislative session at the end of the week. Perhaps legislators will deal with water in a special session. The prison deal didn’t cover savings projected for the prisons in the recent budget agreement. Perhaps in a special session. The tax commission proposal will soon be presented and the governor wants to deal with it right away. In a special session. And education reforms? A special session is scheduled for that, too.
Taken together, the coming special legislative sessions are looking more and more like a regular session of the legislature. And these sessions hold no promise that they will be more productive than the regular session just completed.
Special sessions of the legislature are supposed to be few and far between. The idea is for the legislature to concentrate on a particular thorny problem and resolve it without the distractions a regular session provides.
But, if one special session is piled upon another, the special session is not special any more. Complex issues are subject to horse-trading and distractions are not minimized.
Close Doesn’t Count in Legislative Votes
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, ended this year’s disappointing legislative session by channeling TV’s Maxwell Smart:
“Missed it by THIS much.”
That pretty much was Bass’ reaction when she said that the Assembly just ran out of time when it came to making deeper cuts in the state prison budget, despite her promise last month to come up with a bill that provided the $220 million missing from the Assembly’s “reform lite” version of the bill approved by the Senate.
Steinberg echoed that when he talked about why the Legislature couldn’t get a water deal done, even though Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, agriculture interests and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed that it was priority one this legislative year.
The Bloodletting of California’s Economy
The nation is mired in the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and job losses continue to mount. But as bad as things are nationally, California is faring far worse—with a double-digit unemployment rate exceeding the national average by more than two percent. In the Inland Empire, which I represent, unemployment is now above 14%.
Yet state lawmakers and regulators seem oblivious to the hard times ordinary Californians are facing. They continue to suck the life out of the Golden State’s economy by prescribing more taxes and red tape.
Take for instance a recent decision by the State Water Resources Control Board. Not content to wait for federal standards, the board voted to impose burdensome and questionable new requirements on construction projects across the state. Businesses who fail to meet these restrictive new regulations face fines of up to $27,000 per day.
The Constitutional Convention: Invite Everyone
As a reporter, I spent a good amount of time sneaking into places where I wasn’t supposed to be. Humankind, especially the sub-species known as newspaper editors, have a fascination with exclusive places and events, after all. My experience – over and over – was the same. The story was always better when I could NOT find a way inside. The mystery – and the fact that I could write about the secrecy of the particular event or meeting – made it more interesting. When I managed to sneak in and witness what happened, the story often proved to be a letdown: the negotiation or party was always far more boring in reality than in the imagination.
Which brings me to the ongoing debate about who should be permitted to serve as a delegate at a state constitutional convention. Should delegates be elected in some form? Should regular voters be delegates, chosen at random or through some other kind of system? Views are being expressed and opinions are hardening. Supporters of elections suggest that bringing in random voters would create a chaotic disaster. Supporters of using random voters fear that special interests would dominate elections.
Here’s a simpler way to do it (which was first suggested to me by a very smart and experienced California political consultant with no ties to the convention):
Open up the convention to anyone who wants in.
That’s right. Let’s try Athenian democracy.