t would be a constitutional earthquake, the likes of which California hasn’t seen in 130 years.
California: the eighth largest economy in the world, the most important state in the world’s most important nation, the center of global innovation, has just one problem: it can’t govern itself.
The 2008 budget was a record 80 days late, but, as painful as this year’s process was, it came up short. Without further action, the state will run out of money by February. Even the governor’s office has admitted that we’ll suffer a $42 billion deficit during the next 18 months.
That’s about where we were five years ago when we recalled former governor Gray Davis.
Since August, the Bay Area Council, a 60-year-old association of businesses from nine northern counties, has called for a constitutional convention to address California’s inability to make sense of the state’s challenges.
A sober organization not given to hysteria, the council’s executive director, Jim Wunderman, wrote with Jeffersonian overtones, “It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. Therefore, are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?”
Given Sacramento’s soft corruption and hard incompetence, it’s hard to blame them.
Giant Cogs
Is the machinery moving?
The council has called for a planning assembly in late February to discuss strategy. Imagining the legislature handing off precious power to reshape government strains the mind, but two legislators, one each in the Senate and the Assembly, have introduced bills to call a convention.
If the legislature balks, the Bay Area Council can always try to authorize a convention by public initiative. (After any convention, of course, its proposals would have to be approved by voters.)
They say desperate times call for desperate measures; in politics, no measure is so desperate as a constitutional convention.
Picture the cage fight, the tableau of eye-gouging and face-biting, as California’s entrenched interests,public employees unions, big agriculture, tax warriors, local governments, trial lawyers, and on and on,grasp at the chance to shape the new fundamental law of the land.
Uncertainty
A convention would take every political certainty and toss it into the sky.
What could come down? Incremental changes such as two-year budgeting or open primaries? Something a bit more brazen, like the end of the initiative system, or, more radical, a one-house legislature or a parliamentary system?
Don’t laugh. All of these have been suggested, and anything is possible.
Yet, when many discuss reform, what they really mean is rescinding the rule that requires budget and tax increases to be passed by two-thirds of each house. Although Republicans are a distinct minority, the two-thirds rule gives them disproportionate clout. That leverage has contributed to the annual budget wrangle in which Democrats push for new taxes and Republicans hold out like Spartans against Persians.
More Power
So, for Democratic leaders, reform means giving them more power. Will that fly with Californians? When they say their legislators are out of touch, aren’t voters really talking about Sacramento Democrats?
The Dems can herd up a majority on just about every issue short of the budget and taxes. Yet, the public knows the state has failed to improve roads, cure lobbyist-induced corruption, maintain prisons and educate perfectly helpless children who depend on the state to give them a chance at a decent life.
Will Californians, moderate and sensible voters, believe solutions will fall from the trees when they give Democrats more power?
Any attempt to strip away the super-majority budget and tax rules will run into the skepticism of independent voters who are wise to California’s spending incontinence. In 1998, the state spent $50 billion from its general fund. Today, only 10 years later, that figure has doubled.
As the formidable Sacramento-watcher, columnist Dan Walters has warned, California’s aggregate tax burden,taxes on income, sales, cars, gasoline, alcohol and real property, combined,is nearly as high today as it was in 1978 when Proposition 13 passed. Next year and 2010 might look better for a tax revolt than for loosening the reins on spending and taxation.
Which is why any run at the constitution that doesn’t dramatically increase fiscal responsibility and reign in corruption will fail.
Prudent Measures
On the other hand, a well-run convention could offer a menu of prudent measures to entice fiscally responsible independents and Republicans: A hard cap on spending, one that sticks,such as that proposed a few years ago by former assemblyman (now congressman) John Campbell,not one that could be raped, pillaged and abandoned like those of the past.
Ultimately, conservatives and independents might listen if a convention were to propose union paycheck protection as Schwarzenegger has in the past or a rule like Colorado’s Proposition 54, one that forbids state candidates from taking campaign contributions from businesses and unions that have business with the government.
A convention would be more like Fight Club than Founding Fathers. Its success at the ballot box, however, will depend on whether it can offer something real to California’s majority of fiscal skeptics.
Capaldi is a partner in the business law firm of Spach, Capaldi & Waggaman LLP in Newport Beach and chairman emeritus of The Lincoln Club of Orange County.
