Repair California’s town hall went well

[mithriltabby]

When I initially heard about Repair California’s plans for a constitutional convention for California, I was skeptical: the backers were a business group, and our political process is sufficiently screwed up that a no-holds-barred convention with lots of special interests weighing in could screw things up even more than they already are. I was pleased by the town hall meeting today; the people there were talking sense and pointing out that California’s problems have been building for decades, and are not just the result of the recent downturn. To fix the problems in Sacramento, we need to do more than just repeal the 2/3 rule for passing a budget; we need to fix the system so we aren’t deadlocked between the “loony left” and “radical right” (as one speaker put it).

The plan is to keep the issues addressed by the convention limited (to avoid special interests getting a gravy train hardwired into the constitution), and to select delegates through a random process comparable to jury selection (with some different filters— not mandatory, and with more reasonable compensation) and provide them with access to experts, opportunities for feedback from their home communities, and plenty of time to deliberate with lots of visibility. They had Larry Stone (the Santa Clara County Assessor), Liz Kniss (the Santa Clara County Supervisor), and Richard S. Gordon (the San Mateo County Supervisor) speaking, as well as representatives from Courage Campaign and Common Cause, and the New America Foundation. (The latter group have a Reform California web site.)

I didn’t even have to bring up my favorite electoral reform causes; various speakers brought up clean elections, instant-runoff voting, and proportional representation. (I went to the mike to give people the URLs to the California Clean Money Campaign and Californians for Electoral Reform, since they weren’t in a high-tech setting where I could just tweet them to an overhead screen.

Comments

[redwoodstrega.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me, I'm gonna check all this out, thanks for posting the info.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Need to ponder, imbibe alcohol, and ponder some more. Might have comments later.

NB: I still think the 2/3 rule for passing a budget is a good one. As an alternative, mebbe electing a few less "loony left" and "radical right" might help, neh?

[mithriltabby]

The problem is that there are different ratios required for raising spending and paying for it. If we keep the 2/3 rule, we need to repeal all constraints that passed by less than 2/3 and require a 2/3 for anything in the future. Personally, I’d make it a straight 55% across the board, same as it takes for a bond issue.

I keep harping on electoral reform because that’s what it’s going to take to get better politicians into office. Right now, between a first-past-the-post electoral system and gerrymandering, we have seriously dysfunctional representation. If we merged adjacent districts by fours and used the single transferable vote to elect representatives for the superdistricts, we’d have conservatives in Sacramento representing blocks of voters on the coasts and liberals representing blocks of voters in the Central Valley, and all of them likely more moderate than the current crop.

There’s another town hall in San Francisco on August 11 if you want to investigate firsthand.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Mebbe. Either way, IMHO, it shouldn't be _easy_ to do it.

Mind you, given the shenanigans over the last 15 years, there's a certain part of me that wants to make membership in _either_ legislative body, post 1995 (arbitrary cutoff, but effective enough) a "terminate on sight, no appeal" offense. Yes, we'd lose some good ones, but it'd clean out the pool a bit, and put the fear of /g/o/d voters in 'em.

Ever read Piper's "Lone Star Planet"? ;>

[mithriltabby]

The thing I want to make difficult is shifting costs into the future. Voters respond pretty quickly to high taxes by turning fiscally conservative, but as long as they don’t have to pay for things now they’re happy to demand more from their government. I’d like to have some mechanism for averaging revenue between boom and bust years, but the permanent kick-the-can-down-the-road thing has got to stop.

Found it on Project Gutenberg. Reading...

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Borrow now, pay later. Yeah, that's an old one.

What would be good on that one would be an absolute cap on bonding authority. Also, if the private groups behind every bond measure were forced to pay for the cost of the election in the event a bond measure failed (which would be a BIG dissuasive). And corporate shields do not apply - it's all private individuals.

Right now, there's no downside to trying to spend future $. I think we both agree there needs to be one. Just what form.

[mithriltabby]

Pretty funny, but I’d want to read about societies like that from a nice safe distance...

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Coward. Think of it as robust political debate. ;>

Seriously, I don't think it'd be as bad as you think. "An armed society is a polite society" and all that. You'll note that the tendency to internet flamage demonstrates the reverse of that truism.

[mithriltabby]

Think of it as perverse incentives. If politics presents that high a level of personal risk, the only people who go into politics will be the ones who can count on it as a means of personal enrichment. You’d have corruption even worse than the current revolving door between legislative office and lobbying firms.