In a state ruled by direct democracy in many ways, George Skelton's column might be something close to seditious speech:
All that said, "check-ins" with the voters are what regular elections are about. The way our republican system of democracy was set up by the framers of both the U.S. and California constitutions, the people elect representatives to make decisions about spending and taxes.
You didn't see either the Clinton tax increases or the Bush tax cuts being put to votes of the American people. That occurred at the next elections, when the people voted whether to rehire their representatives.
Only in screwy California, where we have an out-of-control initiative system and a bloated Constitution that Sacramento often stumbles over when it does try to make decisions, do voters perpetually get handed such policy-making power. (LA Times)
Here's the situation we face. We have a state of 37 million voters. At most 10 million of them turn out to vote on any regular basis, or less than a third. Now care to guess how many of these people spent more than 5 minutes researching the issues they are going to vote on?
This is why we moved away from an Athenian-style direct democracy to a representative democracy. Our American founding fathers understood that not every voter had the capacity to take everything into context to make the decisions we expect of our legislators. You could argue that the information age has brought the knowledge necessary closer to the people, but in the end, uninformed voters are making decisions without all of the facts.
Even in a state of 1 million people the system would be impractical, here it's downright unworkable. Skelton takes Brown to task for boxing himself into the corner, but really, it was something of an electoral practicality. He may have won without it, but it sure made it a lot easier. But, here we are, in a position where Brown is now forced to bring this to the voters instead of just doing his job and making the decisions for the state with the Legislature.
Of course, Skelton goes on to throughly lambaste the Republican caucus for being pretty much worthless and waste of taxpayer money. (It's true!) But the real point here, is that while this is where we are headed in the short term, it is ultimately unsustainable to continue to run of the world's largest economies by plebiscite. |
