Sunday, October 31, 2004On voting, referenda, etc.The TurkeyBlogger voted yesterday. Most will not be surprised to learn that I wound up voting a straight Republican slate. I also voted against most of the initiatives and would like to offer an explanation of why for those who suddenly get in the voting both and don't know what to do with the propositions. It is extremely difficult to govern a large entity by popular will. The citizenry, if the Republic is fortunate, have much better things to do than investigate such things as the most appropriate sewage plant design (local level), the fiscal impact of purchasing postcards for tourism centers in bulk from one company instead of allowing local governments to buy from local printers (state level) or whether to make an incident of the Tanzanian ambassador's deliberate spilling of tea upon our Secretary of State's shoes (national level). These are just three places where the formation of policy by otherwise busy citizens would be a bad idea. Others include anything that the city council, state legislature or Congress could pass into law on their own if only they would remove their heads from their patooties long enough to see what everybody else - everybody who votes for initiatives, that is - sees. The representative government that we have at the federal level, for all its problems, is really cool. In less than a hundred pages, we have everything the government's about neatly summarized. All the laws and codes and regulations are just details. As such, they're subject to change if the situation warrants, so long as the proposed changes are in accordance with the Constitution. Constitutions should be short. Ideally, they describe meta-structures and meta-processes - that is, they don't say what the government does or how; rather, they say how the structures and processes of government can be created, evolved, reformed and even junked by the people's elected representatives. This is why citizens' referenda tend to be a bad idea - they're usually about passing laws that the legislature won't. Those laws are either entered on the books as such, in which case the legislature guts them, or as constitutional amendments that the legislature couldn't alter even if the popular will, common sense and the legislature together agree that they should be - you have to pass a counter-amendment. It is, of course, within the rights of states to make the referendum the tool of choice for amending the constitution, and a wise choice it is since sneaky pols would amend themselves into free condos and million dollar a year retirements if they could. But the people, too, have to be discriminating about how they govern themselves. The reason Californians always have a million propositions is not because our constitution is so horribly inflexible that we have to fix it every five minutes - though the referenda could make it so. The problem is that Californians have gotten it into their heads that they can vote for whomever they want for leadership positions without weighing the consequences. Going through the propositions, there were at least two or three that, as near as I can tell, the legislature could pass as a bill and the governor would probably sign. If the people were on board and our leadership could do it, what would be the need of a referendum? Easy: the people have singularly failed in promoting those who push the government in the direction they favor and - worse - turning out on their ear entrenched incumbents who won't listen. Instead, we ignore the primaries because the party hacks control them, elect the Democrats to prove we're compassionate and pass initiatives because we'd really like to be governed by (are you listening, GOP establishment?) moderate Republicans. I'm not speaking for me here. I'm saying that most of what I see in the initiatives, in Schwarzenegger ascent, etc, is an advancing of the country club Republican world view - socially moderate (they hate confrontation), pro-business (because they own them), anti-tax (because they pay them) and mixed on immigrants (because their businesses use them but they don't like to pay taxes to look after them). A lot of Californians who call themselves Democrats fit this bill, especially outside the Bay Area (where everybody's nuts) but can't bring themselves to vote Republican. As a result, our moderate Republicans have turned into pander-bears, less to woo these voters than to make themselves socially acceptable to them, the Democrats, unchecked, have drifted left and the conservative wing of the GOP has become more focused on defeating the moderates than the Democrats. The fault, as I say, is with the voters of California. The voters who shut down bilingual ed, cut services to immigrants, changed property tax rules and such were not Republicans - there aren't enough of them to do it. Rather, an important segment of the Democratic vote put these initiatives over the top, and they're voting for the wrong party. Then they need to come to the dark side and try to shed a little light, registering Republican, recruiting candidates from the socially liberal, fiscally conservative mold and turning out to vote for them so that both the GOP and the Dems will be forced to change. Tuesday will be an important day for the state of California. A few years ago, we threw the bum out in the personage of Gray Davis. Since then, Schwarzenegger has done a pretty good job pushing his program. But the Democrats in the legislature seem to take a long time to get it, taking months to pass watered down versions of already moderate proposals that should have gone through in weeks. Even readers of the San Francisco Chronicle have been exposed to the bare facts of this, as completely whitewashing Democratic intransigence is simply no longer doable. So, will California's citizens show that they are responsible voters by electing a congress and senate that will work with our governor? Or will it be politics as usual - an ever strong Democratic presence in the legislature and another round of citizens' initiatives designed to compensate for the lousy government we chose for ourselves? 
posted by gbarto at 8:19 AM |
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