ShareThisCalifornia Democratic legislative leaders, acknowledging the dysfunction of state government, say they want to place reforms before voters this year.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said the "system of finance is broken" as he and Assembly Speaker John A. Perez unveiled their package Thursday, a mixture of constitutional amendments and internal legislative reforms.
Perez said the reforms would "make our government more accountable, more effective."
Recent polls do indeed indicate that voters are disgusted, with approval of the perpetually gridlocked Legislature barely breaking into the teens, and are open to change. But what kind of change is still uncertain since one person's reform is another person's power grab.
The centerpiece of the Democrats' package is their long-sought goal of reducing the legislative vote on the budget from two-thirds to a simple majority, thus eliminating Republicans' leverage.
However, a constitutional amendment to reduce the budget vote would require a two-thirds legislative vote itself, and Assembly GOP leader Martin Garrick declared that "initiatives on the ballot that would undermine long-standing taxpayer protections are dead on arrival." Without the two-thirds vote provision, Democrats would drop reform.
This Catch-22 scenario makes it exceedingly unlikely that any significant reforms will emerge from the Capitol. And reform efforts outside the building aren't faring any better.
The Democrats' proposal is a slightly revised version of what California Forward, a bipartisan civic group, developed after spending millions of dollars in foundation grants. But it has been unable to raise enough money to put its measures on the ballot via initiative.
California Forward's failure matched that of Repair California, which was created by the Bay Area Council, a consortium of corporate executives, to promote a constitutional convention to adopt reforms, but has been unable to raise the several million dollars that would be needed to qualify measures for the ballot.
While changing the two-thirds vote and other aspects of the Democratic package, such as giving more taxing power to local governments, would require constitutional amendments, there's nothing to prevent the Legislature from reforming itself internally.
The Legislature could, for instance, reduce the number of time- and money-wasting bits of legislative trivia, as Democratic Treasurer Bill Lockyer, one of Steinberg's predecessors, has suggested. It could require bills to be in print for at least 24 hours before voting on them, as Republican Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries has proposed.
Comprehensive governmental reform would be much, much broader, of course, but it probably would require a constitutional convention. And it probably wouldn't happen until there's some kind of cataclysmic event, such as a complete fiscal collapse.
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
ColumnMust credit Sacramento Bee
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