[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img] There are many things I love about California. I love that it’s sunny almost every day. I love that I can plant almost anything in my front and back yards, and it will thrive. There is abundant, local produce at the farmer’s market if I’m too lazy to grow my own. I can go to the beach one day, the desert the next, and the mountains another.
But there is one thing I hate about California. It is our failed experiment with direct democracy. If I had a billion dollars and a lot more time on my hands, I’d sponsor one last game-changing Constitutional amendment – a proposition to end all propositions.
A few days ago, the latest 64-page Official Voter Information Guide arrived in the mail, courtesy of the Secretary of State. And so begins another week of poring over the arguments for, the arguments against, and proposed statutory or constitutional language – and this is only for a special election.
If people don’t have time to make healthy meals for themselves and their children, or to read more than a few books a year, then when are they to find time to peruse the voter guide and make an informed vote, guided by their conscience?
I imagine the billionaires and lobbyists behind a number of measures count on the true answer to that question: ain’t gonna happen.
Please, No More Propositions
The number of ill-conceived, ill-meaning and ill-fated propositions is legion. The California constitution has more entries than a sex worker at the Bunny Ranch. Consider a favorite example, infamously known as Prop. 13. Sure, it provides an easy, do-in-your-head calculation as you contemplate the purchasing of a home. Just multiply the sale price by 1.25 percent and you have your approximate tax burden, forever.
My husband and I bought our first California house, and we marveled that the property taxes were far less than we’d paid back east. A few road trips on crumbling streets, and a peek into failing schools quickly cured me of my tax-saving jubilation. At neighborhood meetings, local residents would complain about the lack of services from the city. I looked at these folks, many of whom had purchased their homes before the dawn of time, and wondered how many services they expected to get from their $400 annual contribution.
In the late 1990s, there was Prop. 209, which virtually eliminated race-based affirmative action at public institutions. And after throwing out the window both diversity and the one reasonable means of remediating circumstances that had developed without equal protection of law, newspaper editors and University of California officials raised their collective eyebrows at the sudden lack of black and brown faces in first-year classrooms.
Speaking of Bigotry
Most recently, last fall Prop. 8 showed Californians and the nation what the phrase “tyranny of the majority” really means. Hate gays or at least gay marriage? Good, because we can append discrimination to the State constitution with a bare majority of those who show up to the polls—and thereby eliminate its preexisting “principle of equality.”
As I watch my tax dollars siphoned from health and education into the paychecks of prison guards and stem cell research centers, I have to ask the question that’s been uppermost in my mind since I became a California resident. What in the heck do the legislators do?
The upcoming special election is necessary primarily because our state senators and assemblypersons can’t make the hard decisions. So they leave it to the voters, and our state budget looks like a bad game of Civilization.
If I had my choice, no doubt I’d spend all the available budget monies on infrastructure, poor and failing schools, and a massive mass transit system. I imagine my neighbor may choose something different. Neither would likely do what was absolutely necessary to provide all the services that a large state, and the world’s fifth largest economy, needs.
They Say ‘You Decide’
Enter representatives and indirect democracy.
But our system is broken. So rather than my elected representatives doing what needs to be done, whether that’s raise taxes, rein in spending or fight off special interest groups – they toss it back to the voters. Couple that with a few wily billionaires, loopy special interest groups, and a few religious zealots—many of whom don’t even live in the state—and here we are with a budget seemingly permanently out of balance, and a sales tax close to 10 percent.
Last week I kept a campaign staffer, for Los Angeles District 5 candidate David Vahedi, captive on my front steps as I lamented the state of our state, and the state of our city, and that abandoned car that’s been parked illegally around the corner for two months.
As I railed against our current non-responsive Councilmember bucking for a promotion and various related problems, I surprised him by saying that I planned to vote “no” on all six propositions presented on the May 19 ballot. But what about schools, teachers and first responders? he asked.
It’s not about those groups in the short term, I responded.
It’s about forcing legislators to work together to hammer out those compromises that need to be made—and that can’t be made in a direct democracy as large as ours. States cannot debt finance like the federal government. So either we tax the citizens for world-class schools and working roads, or we don’t. Each choice is valid for different policy reasons.
But at the essence of that is choice.
Asking citizens every few months to make those choices at macro levels, divorced from the compromises and prioritizations that ordinarily go along with such important decisions, makes no sense.
Presumably, someone hired to make law has the time and resources to study the issues in the depth they deserve, and the vision necessary to determine, for example, whether a lottery is a good idea to boost education spending, or whether every money raising scheme will yield to the general fund in the long run, never really achieving its stated purpose. If they fail to make the appropriate decision, then they have to live with the consequences, even if the consequences force them from office and permanently exclude them from the term-limit shuffle.
Sure we as voters have to live with the consequences, too.
But most of us are too ill-equipped, ill-informed, and simply unable to make it work. And you can see the result. It’s California.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com.
