Author: Tony Quinn

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.

The tax and fee scheme dreamed up by legislative Democrats and probably soon to be signed into law by Gov. Schwarzenegger is rightly called the “nuclear option” because it blows away legislative Republicans by allowing tax increases to be passed with a majority vote. This is probably the first step in rendering Republicans powerless because the Democrats are sure to come up with a way to get around the two-thirds budget vote as well.

This is nothing new – it has been around for a long time. It was just never triggered until now. Here’s how it works: Democrats are raising sales, income and oil company taxes but lowering the gas tax, thus creating a “tax neutral” situation. Their lawyers tell them this does not trigger the constitutional two-thirds vote requirement for tax increases, it can be done with a majority vote. Democrats then replaced the gas tax with a 39 cent per gallon “fee.” “Regulatory fees” are majority vote thanks to a 1997 court case called Sinclair Paint. In 2000, business tried to pass an initiative to disallow majority vote fees but it failed.

The California Republican Party is dead. Call the undertaker, haul away the corpse.

But was it murder, or was it suicide? Mostly a combination, a result both of demographic changes and the stupidity of Republican leaders.

The modern GOP began with the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in1966. He built a coalition of fiscally conservative suburban voters and “Reagan Democrats,” alienated from their historic party. Republicans carried California for six straight presidential elections using that formula (1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988)

But with the end of the Cold War, defense related jobs disappeared, and were replaced by the high technology information age. The new high tech voters were turned off by a less tolerant GOP conservatism, and over the past 20 years Republicans have suffered a long decline in the suburbs. The 2008 election marked the end of the GOP with most high wealth suburban voters.

In a series of comments this summer, I wrote that Proposition 11 could pass, despite numerous unsuccessful past redistricting reform initiatives, if the proponents made the political class, rather than the arcane subject of redistricting, the center of their campaign.

That appears to be what happened. The race is not over as there are several million still uncounted absentee and provisional ballots, but the margin seems large enough that Proposition 11 will be enacted and California will have a redistricting commission for the 2011 legislative redistricting.

In a series of very effective television ads, proponents made the point that Prop 11 disciplined out of control politicians and allowed the voters to turn them out of office, without of course saying how. Proponents were also lucky that legislative Democrats and their allies did not spend lavishly to defeat the measure as they have in the past, and that some prominent Democrats joined Gov. Schwarzenegger in supporting redistricting reform.

Joe Mathews dismisses my analysis that the redistricting initiative might pass with all the usual arguments as to why past measures lost: support by good government reformers and the media is irrelevant; the public doesn’t care, it’s biggest booster, Gov. Schwarzenegger, is unpopular, etc. etc.

Joe is pretty much like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day, and this may be his hour. If the politics of the past is prologue, he is right — it will lose.

So what’s different? Joe points to “good government” and media support for Schwarzenegger’s Proposition 77 in the 2005 special election. But Prop 77 got caught in the maelstrom that sunk it along with the three other initiatives on the ballot. It did call for an immediate election in the new lines that was interpreted (by me among others), as an attempted Republican power grab. These problems will not plague the 2008 initiative.