One Small Good Seed, Buried By Democrats’ Bad Initiative Deed
If Democrats want to win 2/3 of the legislature, they should start acting like a party you might trust with 2/3 of the legislature.
If they ever want to fix the governing system of California to restore majority accountability, they should start acting like people you would trust to reform the governing system.
It’s not going to be enough to point out that the other guys are nuts.
In this context, the public consideration by Democrats (pushed by their tactically acute but strategically silly labor allies) of a last-minute bill to push initiatives Democrats don’t like from the June to November ballots is doubly dangerous.
The move won’t get very far. And it’s guaranteed to sow doubts about Democrats – specifically about whether they respect the people’s will. And this is the lesser of the dangers – because doubts about Democrats are merely the party’s problem.
Initiatives All Belong on November Ballot
The Democrats’ plan to jam through a late-session bill blocking future initiatives from appearing on primary election ballots is a sneaky, baldly partisan, pro-union measure.
Having said that, it’s not a bad idea.
Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, admitted Monday that the party is “considering” a bill that would limit all initiative measures to future November general election ballots, beginning, not coincidentally, next year.
It isn’t meant as a good-government plan.
You see, pro-GOP types already are collecting signatures for an initiative that would ban unions from using members’ dues for political purposes and barring direct contributions from unions. Let’s call it “Son of Paycheck Protection,” a similar measure that as Prop. 75 failed in then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disastrous November 2005 special election.
Charge: Assembly ‘Cooks The Books’
Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, today presented independent research he says proves the California Assembly has manipulated budget numbers and spending patterns to mislead the public.
The battle between Democratic leadership and Portantino heated up last week over Portantino’s accusations of secretive bookkeeping practices by the Assembly. Thursday, Portantino introduced AB 1129 to force the Assembly to comply with the California Public Records Act, making access to Assembly financial and administrative records much easier.
Why the Green Jobs Movement Failed
Cross-posted at NewGeography.
“Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed,” the New York Times reported last week, drawing similar conclusions to the ones we drew in our essay for The New Republic last October. Silicon Valley, home to the green jobs movement, actually saw the number of green jobs decline from 2003 – 2010.
The signature green jobs program was retrofitting homes and buildings to become more energy efficient, which boosters thought would create “millions” of jobs in the inner-city. In 2009 the Center for American Progress claimed that $5 billion in stimulus funding for weatherization and a price on carbon would lead to the retrofitting of every building in America in ten years, generating 900,000 jobs. In reality, we noted in TNR, the weatherization program had created just 13,000 jobs. “Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes,” the Times reported, “California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter… the program never really caught on as homeowners balked at the upfront costs.”