Walters: Not Worth Fixing 2/3rds Rule

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

David hits Jim Boren for a "pox on both your houses" column.  I  guess there is something in the air, because Dan Walters has a pretty similar one today.  Walters starts off pretty strong, bashing Arnold for is failure to live up to his "reform" campaign promises and contributing to the dysfunction.  Then he decides to tackle the 2/3rds rule and concludes that changing it will be just as bad.

It is, critics say, undemocratic, and they have a point. But in a crude way, the two-thirds vote does provide at least some check on what probably would be an even less seemly process were it to be replaced by a simple-majority vote, giving the majority party full power. This year's melodrama indicated what would happen.

Democrats clandestinely loaded up the budget "trailer bills" with all sorts of extraneous stuff, some of it pork barrel spending and some of its completely disconnected to the budget, but the GOP Senate holdout at least gave the public and the media an opportunity to examine the bills in detail, and some of the more questionable items were removed.

I don't know what world Walters is living in, but the Republican holdout was not over the trailer bills.  The ability to look at the makeup of the bills was an unintended benefit.  The overall cost to the state was much worse

Without the 2/3rds rule there would not be a big time crunch on passing the budget.  There would only be two sides for negotiations: the Democrats in the legislature and the governor.  Now that assumes Democratic control of both houses, but really, that is a pretty safe assumption.  That should eliminate the ability to ram through trailer bills and also the need to create side deals with the Republicans.

With a simple-majority vote, we probably would see a return to the secret drafting of the state budget that was commonplace before reforms were installed in the mid-1970s, giving California something akin to the corrupt "earmarking" and other noxious practices of the federal budget.

Were the two-thirds vote to be abolished, therefore, we would need some process safeguards to replace it, including a full public airing of the trailer bills before their passage.

We need a full airing of all bills.  There is nothing special about the trailer bills.  If there is a real issue with earmarking, we need to put a rule in place for disclosure.  We should know who is asking for what and let them defend that request.  I agree with Walters that there needs to be sunshine, however that should not stop us from working to eliminate the 2/3rds rule.  If conservatives are worried about earmarking, that should be included in negotiations.  I doubt that they would find a whole lot of opposition, after all that's what the Dems have been pushing for on a national level.