Author: Jon Fleischman

Ever since the people of California, back in 1990, passed Proposition 140 and imposed term limits on California’s Constitutional officers and the State Legislature, there have been efforts promoted by political insiders to do away with those limits, or at least to weaken them. Many politicians and the people engaged directly with them find term limits to be an inconvenient insertion of the people’s will into what they prefer to be a Patrician process.

There has been an increased level of "chatter" amongst California’s elites as they have expressed their pleasure (especially newspaper editorial boards) at a new research paper released by the Center for Government Studies (CGS) that is critical of term limits for, among other reasons, not achieving the desired goal of proponents of creating a "citizen legislature" where ex-pols go back home to live under the laws they helped create, and also for causing a "dearth" of experience within the legislature.

The CGS study asserts that because many termed-out legislators tend to find other positions within government, that in doing so they do not actually return back to private life. With all due respect to CGS, I can name dozens of former legislators that I know of who actually have reached their term limits and are back home.

Today is election day for voters in the 36th Congressional District on the West end of Los Angeles County. This District’s partisan voter registration gives a big edge to Democrats, and whether one or two Dems make the runoff, it is very unlikely that the successor to Jane Harman will not come from her same political party.

But my intention with this post is not to provide in-depth political analysis of the CD 36 Special Election — I’m happy to leave that kind of cut-up to Allan Hoffenblum or Tony Quinn. I actually wanted to use today, election day, to bitterly complain about the new rules of engagement with passage of Proposition 14. Specifically, I want to lament the passing of the spirited primary process where candidates of each party were able to wage strong campaigns against one another, assured that when the dust settled, each party would put forward it’s top vote-getter against the nominees of other parties.

I read with interest in the Los Angeles Times that billionaire developer Philip Anschutz has apparently begun an all-out effort to get the California legislature and Governor to provide his planned 64,000 seat downtown Los Angeles football stadium project an exemption from onerous environmental regulations. Apparently these regulations would add years to the duration of time it would take to build the project, in addition to adding major additional costs.

On the natural, I would tell Anschutz and his lobbying team that they are tilting at a windmill — with the disturbingly wackly-left environmentalists that dominate the majority Democrat party in the Capitol in control of the process.

That having been said, I never would have predicted that in 2009 this legislature would do exactly that — waiving California Environmental Quality Act regulations — for another vastly wealthy major developer, Ed Roski, Jr., who is aiming to built his own football stadium on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.

Last week I conducted an interview for Reason Television, Is California Too Big To Fail, in which I talk about the pension tsunami facing California. I review Republican and Democrat resolve relative to our state budget crisis. And I make it clear that, in retrospect, Arnold Schwarzenegger should have received an Academy Award for Best Dramatic Performance in a Recall Election. Check out the Reason.tv interview to here.

Joel Fox asked me to follow up on that interview with a column for Fox & Hounds. I thought hard about it, and decided that I would treat readers to a review of the five upcoming June ballot measures – in rhyme! Enjoy…

The measures before the voters this June are only a few;
Compared with November when we will be facing a slew.
Thirteen through seventeen, the numbers assigned by Bowen;
To explain them all by rhyme, I had best get going…

• It is ironic that Courage Campaign is out there trying to compare Meg Whitman to Sarah Palin – I really don’t see where the two of them really have anything in common — the intellectual New England woman, with a penchant for over-analysis, versus the free-spirited “frontier girl” from Wasilla Alaska with a tendency to shoot from the hip.

• People keep asking me which of the myriad of reforms coming our way next year via the ballot box will help put California back on the right track. My answer is always the same, why don’t we try electing a Republican majority in the legislature – that’s the “reform” we need.

• Capitol Weekly’s recently released legislative scorecard gave an early Christmas present to the six GOPers who supported February’s massive $16 billion tax increase by leaving the vote on it, as well as the vote to place Proposition 1A on the ballot, off of their scorecard.