| Remember all that talk of a Constitutional Convention? Well, the talk has quieted down as Sacramento waits to see what happens with our once and future Governor Brown. But despite the majority vote budget measure (Prop 25) passing, there are still many structural barriers between us and a functioning government.
Of course, we still don't have a real majority budget, because there is still the 2/3 revenue rule. That now includes a more expansive definition of fee/tax that bars most of the majority vote revenue methods.
Others will tell you that we just aren't moderate enough, that our legislators would work together more if we just got more "competitive" districts. We'll see about the best districts that money can buy in 2012, but my strong hunch is that little will change. After all, why should it? Legislators are only in their positions for 6-8 years, and then they will have to run for some other position. Even with a top-two system, strong stances play better in soundbites than nuanced compromise. So, we get a legislature that represents their constituents, that is the people who vote for them. We shouldn't expect something that we ourselves don't support.
Despite the lack of real solutions from those really willing and able to fund them, we still have many parties willing to offer up some untried and untested "good government" reforms. You know the type of reforms that bring us something new, and further away from the representative democracy that worked for so long before Prop 13. And, of course, the suggestions always come from somebody with a pretty good size personal wealth, who just wants to do right by his/her home state. Sounds just like the Whitman campaign that we just finished repudiating, doesn't it?
Robert already mentioned Nicholas Berggruen, and I'm pretty comfortable with his take on the situation.
Now, that isn't to say that we won't see additional attempts at reform, some better than others. Newly inaugurated Asm. Mike Gatto has a bunch of constitutional reforms that he has built into a package that he introduced as soon as he hit the legislature. Getting them out of Legislature will be a pretty monumental task, but you can't win if you don't play. And these reforms are all pretty common sense. They won't fix everything, but certainly a good start.
So, where does reform go from here? Well the likely answer is that it goes back to where it's always been, limping along on the back-burner. Maybe we're waiting for some shocking event to really change the atmosphere, but even the troubles that we've had over the past few years haven't really been enough to shake any positive reform into action. We'll see if the upcoming shock doctrine is any better. |
