Two Important Court Decisions for Signatures and the Initiative Process
Conservatives say they like judges who follow the law and the original intent behind it. Liberals say they like judges who understand the world and have empathy.
I like judges who agree with me.
In that vein, there were two very agreeable court decisions on the initiative process in the past week.
Do We Need Initiative Rules for Counties?
California counties are crashing on checking and sampling signatures before a Thursday deadline to qualify initiatives for the November ballot. The procrastination, er… late turn-in of a half-dozen measures has created uncertainty.
What’s also created uncertainty is this: there’s no real rule on how counties can count when they face multiple measures and short time limits. Do they count the stuff that comes in first? Or the measures that come with the most possible signatures? Or the initiative that seems more broadly important? It’s not clear. State law sets the deadlines for how quickly counties must count signatures, but not how they do so.
There are two things to be done here. The first is to give counties some clarity, perhaps legislatively. A suggested rule of thumb: the initiative whose backers are first to submit should be counted first.
Dear Jerry …
Dear Jerry,
Please, please shut up before you screw this whole thing up.
You may not realize it, but you enter the race for governor – by the way, glad to see that you’re in the race and campaigning full-speed – with San Francisco Bay-sized reservoirs of good will. This feeling is present of people of both parties (conservative Republicans remember your frugality), and is particularly strong among Californians who remember you or have parents or grandparents who remember you and your father fondly.
How PG&E Can Apologize
PG&E owes an apology to virtually everyone in the state – save the broadcasters that made out on all the advertising it bought – for sponsoring the monstrosity that was Prop 16.
The measure embodied much of what’s wrong with California’s governing system — in how it sought to limit local control, impose supermajorities, and change the constitution without real deliberation or consultation with the legislature.
PG&E’s offense was so great that the apology it owes us has to consist of much more than simply words. The company should pledge to bankroll the major constitutional revision the state needs.
The New York Times’ California ‘Revolution’
One opinion that unites my family – a family of newspaper people – is that you can’t trust anything you read in the New York Times. My dad writes for the Washington Post. My mom’s an editor at USA Today. My wife is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I was a staffer at the LA Times before joining the think tank. The NYT is a competitor for all of us.
But even as a Times skeptic, I was taken aback by the front page headline this morning, declaring that the passage of Prop 14 represents a "revolution" that’s likely to spread across the country, Prop 13-style. Even supporters of Prop 14 (congratulations to them, by the way) know that’s not true.
Prop 14 is actually quite modest. (I thought it far too modest-and thus a problematic distraction from the fight for real reform of California’s broken system.) Prop 14 may or may not produce more moderates in the legislature (there’s little evidence of this, given the limited data we have with Washington state’s experience with same).
What the Swiss Get Right and We Get Wrong on Initiatives
A couple weeks back, I moderated a couple different events comparing the initiative process in Switzerland (where it originated) and in California. What makes these two systems different? And why should it matter?
Here is the answer, in essence:
The Swiss have integrated their initiative process with their government – and kept their initiative process separate from their political and election systems. We Californians have done exactly the opposite. We integrated our initiative process with our politics and elections – but have kept it separate from our government.
GOP Gets the Optics Right
Get ready for the national magazine covers and the cable TV pieces about the "new faces" of politics in California: Republican businesswomen from Silicon Valley.
The visuals on Tuesday night’s victories were great for the GOP. The state party with a long history of nominating the most boring white guy available instead made history by nominating Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. Each winner made a point of thanking the other in her victory speech, which will only fuel the media hub-bub about them.
It’s an open question, however, whether, when you scratch the surface, either Whitman or Fiorina represent that much of a departure. They are two more in a long line of candidates whose wealth and prominence gave them a big edge. (Look no further than the governor’s office for an example of a wealthy GOPer).
Five Contests to Watch on Election Night
Yes, yes. The gubernatorial and U.S. Senate primaries look like snoozers. Which is why one must dig a little deeper for election night intrigue.
In that spirit, here are five results to watch on election night to keep things interesting:
1. Abel Maldonado vs. the top two primary. Who wins a higher percentage of the vote — Maldonado in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor or the measure he spawned, Prop 14?
A Prop 15 For Ballot Measures?
Prop 15 opens the door to public campaign financing by setting up an experiment with the Secretary of State’s office in the next two statewide elections.
That’s intriguing, but not the place where public finance might be most useful. (There haven’t been a lot of secretaries of state buying the office). No, where California needs public finance most is in ballot measure elections.
Prop 16, which is wonderful because it serves as a good example for so many things that plague California, is instructive here as well. Its sole corporate backer is spending $40 million – plus to support the measure. The no campaign will spend peanuts. That’s not a fair fight.
Five Things We’ve Learned About Whitman
Campaigns, by their nature, give incomplete and distorted pictures of candidates. That’s true of the very, very long contest for the GOP nomination for governor (a race that’s already more than a year old and will end, mercifully, next week).
That said, there are a few key bits of information that the campaign has revealed about the likely winner (if the polls may be believed), Meg Whitman. Here are the five things I’ve learned:
1. She does not think there is such a thing as overkill.
If you think California unemployment is bad now, imagine how bad things might have been without all the hiring Whitman did. The campaign is over-staffed, as Whitman gobbled up some people just to keep them away from Poizner. Her spending broke every existing record, propping up TV stations all over California. Whether the dollars could be justified by any metric seemed beyond the point. She had it, so she spent it.