The Political Reform Blog

Joe Mathews, journalist, Schwarzenegger biographer, and New America Irvine Senior Fellow, recently shared his opinion on the prospect for a constitutional convention on the Fox and Hounds Daily:

 His two insights:

1.  A constitutional convention, while it would be difficult and dangerous, is something California should do. There is so much frustration with the status quo here, and so many different ideas about how to fix things, that we need a top-to-bottom review of our state constitution. We need to pare back the convention (it runs more than 150 pages), and look at all three branches - the legislative, executive and judicial.

2.  The Bay Area Council and other good government groups, in their heart of hearts, don't really want a constitutional convention. They want legislative reform - changes in how laws are made, budgets are passed, and lawmakers are elected.

That's an interesting perspective, one that reformers are going to have to address honestly as they move forward on this issue. 

A standing room only crowd packed a hotel ballroom in the state capital yesterday to consider plans for a Constitutional Convention to overhaul California's clearly dysfunctional government.  Over three hundred people  answered the call for a Summit concerning the political future of California, which Sacramento Bee columnist and panelist Dan Walters referred to as "the most complex and diverse society in the history of humankind."

The California Constitutional Convention Summit, co-sponsored by the New America Foundation, was striking in its enthusiasm for fundamental political reform.

Is there a danger that delegates to a Constitutional Convention will be too radical in the reforms they propose? "The danger is they won't be bold enough," according to Dan Walters.

Coming so closely after the budget meltdown, there was, not surprisingly, seemingly universal support for doing away with the 2/3's rule for passing budgets and raising taxes.  One Republican panelist was perhaps the only noticeable voice of dissent on that issue.

Otherwise, ideas for reform came from all over the place.  Even California's Lt. Governor, John Garamendi, got into the act with a call for a unicameral legislature.

I'm borrowing the title of this post from a terrific book by Duke Political Science Professor John Aldrich. 

It poses a good question, one that we cannot afford to lose sight of as we think about political reform on a grand scale in California. 

Why Parties? 

The answer is that our government would be unworkable without them.

Legislators use parties to coordinate their actions. The Founders decried the influence of faction but quickly found that groups that banded together in the legislature dominated those who didn't.  Order trumps chaos.  

And it turns out that this order is very useful.  Voters employ party labels to evaluate the results of coordinated actions by members of their government.  If these actions work as planned - to lower the unemployment rate for example - members of that party stay in office.  If they don't, the party gets thrown out.  

This is called accountability.*  It's the cornerstone of any democratic system. 

Steven Hill’s excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times usefully corrects sloppy media descriptions of the “gang” primary measure that Sen. Abel Maldonado extorted out of the Legislature as the price of doing his budget duty. I would go one step further: this measure would end the idea of “party primaries” as we know them.

One of the most exciting things about the California Constitutional Convention Summit that The New America Foundation is co-sponsoring with the Bay Area Council next Tuesday is that it has the potential to act as a channel for focusing and combining the efforts of different political reform campaigns.  Many of these have similar goals but are operating on parallel tracks. 

For example, last fall Mark Paul and I drafted a proposal to radically reorder California legislative elections into a system of region-based proportional representation.  One element of this plan  was increasing the size of the state legislature from 120 representatives in two houses to 360 in one unicameral body.

At the very same time, a California voter named Michael Warnken was filing a detailed brief in a federal court in Sacramento. His suit claims that the massive size of California's legislative districts - greater than 400,000 people for each seat in the lower house - constitutes grossly inadequate and hence illegally poor representation for the state's citizens.  At a hearing last month, a federal judge refused to dismiss the case.  You can find out more about his efforts here at his site, California Commonwealth.

With Californians competing with almost half a million of their fellow citizens to get the attention even of the members of the State Assembly, how can their voices be heard?

The Bay Area Council couldn't have picked a better time to convene the February 24 California Constitutional Convention Summit. With so many Californians disgusted by the behavior they have just witnessed at the State Capitol, this is truly, as we parents have learned to call it, the teachable moment.

California had no good budget choices. When states, because of economic slumps, face deficits and must balance their budgets, their actions inevitably put a drag on spending and jobs, deepening the recession.

But the final California budget, and the process that produced it––secretive, dominated by special interests, unnecessarily prolonged––once again showed Californians how badly broken the governance and budget systems are.

Welcome to the Political Reform blog of the New America Foundation. On this blog we hope to foster substantive discussion of political reform in California and nationwide. In California, this is a particularly good time for such discussion since the Bay Area Council, a group of forward-looking business people in the Bay area, have proposed a Constitutional Convention in California. They, along with the New America Foundation, League of Women Voters, Common Cause, Willie C. Velasquez Institute and others have cosponsored a summit on February 24 in Sacramento to discuss the possibility of a constitutional convention for California. Find out more about that summit here.

Please feel free to voice your opinions and heartfelt wishes about political reform, constitutional convention and other issues on this blog (and do it respectfully, of course).

Thanks, and welcome aboard the Political Reform Train!

Steven Hill
Director, Political Reform Program, New America Foundation