Posted by Jon Fleischman at 12:00 am on May 22, 2009 Comments Off on Capitol Insiders Aren’t Done — Voters Who Rejected 1A-1E Need To Reject A Scheme To Close General Elections
As the ‘post mortems’ have been written about the massive defeat
of all of the substantive measures on Tuesday’s special election
ballot, most credible observers of California politics have
concluded that a large part of the reason that the measures lost is
that to the electorate, they represented the results of a
consummate “insiders game.” There is no doubt in my mind that
these measures, which were more or less designed to try, as best as
possible, to maintain the status quo in Sacramento by patching
together a number of disparate and, frankly, ill-conceived policy
ideas that seemed to have as their one common theme the appeasement
of the interest groups that dominate the politic scene (and
political financial giving) in state politics.
Voters should be aware of the fact that while they have
dispatched most of the terrible ballot measures produced by last
February’s ill-fated budget deal, that resulted in massive tax
increases but did nothing to solve the state’s structural budget
troubles, that there is one more “gift” from Capitol insiders – it
is commonly referred to by its proponents and by the main stream
media as an “open… Read More