California: Reforming Ourselves Into Oblivion
By Peter Schrag
As the Sacramento Democrats huff and puff about Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto of their gimmick-heavy budget and the punditocracy decides which of them is most at fault, the real story gets missed -- again.
The most obvious culprit is the ever-more insular Republican cult, which has spent the past three decades exploiting California’s minority veto. It enables one third of the state’s legislators to out-vote the other two thirds on any tax or other revenue increase.
Beyond that is an electorate that can’t make up its collective mind what it wants – or rather, stubbornly demands California services with Mississippi taxes. And beyond that there are thirty years of “reforms” and ballot box budgeting that have so convoluted the system it hardly functions at all.
The most recent of those fixes was Proposition 25 that the voters passed last November, which lowers the two-thirds vote required to pass the budget to a simple majority, but leaves intact the supermajority needed to raise taxes.
The Patriot Act and the Quiet Death of the US Bill of Rights
By Zack Kaldveer
Consumer Federation of California
With the stroke of an autopen from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the once articulate critic of the Patriot Act signed a four year extension of the most dangerous assault on American civil liberties in US history without a single additional privacy protection.
One would think that this reauthorization would have incited vigorous debate in the halls of Congress and at least a fraction of the breathless 24/7 media coverage allotted the Anthony Weiner “sexting” scandal. Instead, three weeks ago the House (250 to 153) and Senate (72 to 23) approved, and the President signed, an extension of this landmark attack on the Bill of Rights with little notice and even less debate.