This is the followup to my comments of last Thursday.

As bad as it was for Republicans Tuesday, one can see that, still, voters on one hand, are for limited and accountable government.  What am I talking about?  The election in California was a total wipeout.  Yes, of course it was on the statewide offices.  But we look to the propositions and one can see the roots of a conservative, keep-government-off-my-back mentality.  Now the logic of placing the candidates in statewide office in that same election that defy those tenets of limited and accountable government, is the voter schizophrenia that election experts and party officials are always trying to get a handle on.  So it happens again in California as it appears 8 or even all 9 statewide elections will go to Democrat candidates.  Even then, several good propositions passed and bad ones were stopped.

My own favorites were that Prop 20 passed and Prop 27 was soundly defeated, meaning the redistricting process will be at least 90% cleaner than it has been with legislators drawing lines. Voters didn’t buy the line that the Redistricting Commission was too expensive and a new unneeded bureaucracy.

Another big win was dark horse Prop 26’s passage, which defies those big spending candidates just elected by the same voters by further requiring 2/3 votes for ‘new revenue’ measures.  This coupled with Prop 13, 42, a couple of Prop 1-A’s sheltering local government and gas tax dollars, makes the now-passed Prop 25 a fascinating combination.  By a simple majority the Dems can now pass a budget but cannot jack up fees or taxes, because of these constitutional constraints, to pay for their spending desires.  
What the voters heard on why they should pass Prop 25 was "on-time budgets" and "penalize legislators", both understandable desires but not the reality of 25.  The opposition, as with many failed campaigns didn’t get the message out of what 25 would really do.  Smoke and mirrors or "borrowing budgets" will still make budgets appear to work and satisfy 25’s loose requirements.  Just tossing a sham one sided budget on the Governor’s desk "on time" would get around 25’s penalties on legislators.  No longer can they call it ‘bi-partisan’ as the handful of Republican votes is no longer needed. 

One fear is that Dems will slip new taxes into the budget document.  They will hope that the now non-2/3 majority budget vote will mask said new tax.  Will this be tried even though Prop 25 proponents and Jerry Brown campaigned that would not happen under Brown or 25?  We’ll see.  If/when they do try an end run on the 2/3 tax, you can be certain there will be plenty of us to make sure that the voice of Prop 13 is not lost and the fight will be carried to the highest court in the land and to the publics consciousness.  

As for the rest, voters also spoke for accountability via Prop 22, notwithstanding some of the flaws in it.  They heard in 22 "leave local dollars alone, fix your own spending problem Sacramento" as they have in many previous propositions protecting gas tax and local government dollars, etc.

Defeating Prop 24 means at some level voters want tax fairness on those that create jobs in California, even if they didn’t figure out Prop 23 would help preserve job loss from draconian regulations via CO2 laws.  A steady campaign diet of Big Polluters and Big Oil and Big Texas shied ’em away from what was really a discussion about CO2 only, [arguably a non–pollutant] and when to start regulating it…and so 23 was defeated.  The message did not reach voters about job loss from Prop 23’s loss and AB32’s enactment.  It will later when the effects are felt in a non-recovering economy, as California sits on its own CO2 regulating, cap and trade island.  Maybe another Prop 23 will be "ready for prime time" to voters in 2014 or even 2012.

On the straight-up question of whether voters desired a new DMV fee for dollars for parks, Prop 21 was soundly defeated.  Does that make voters ‘anti-parks’?  Or are they just sensitive to paying more DMV fees…

Lastly there was Prop 19, defeated as even California is not ready for legalized marijuana.  

As we will be faced with voters having elected a legislature potentially capable of passing any Big Government bill and a governor capable of signing them, at the same time, voters have sent the signal of reining legislators in themselves via several of these aforementioned propositions.  There is conservatism in California, it just depends what personality it takes its form in.
At least this is what I’ll tell myself as we battle for some sanity in the upcoming legislative session.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 7th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.