Open Primary Election in California
Budget stalemates are not a new phenomenon in the State of California. For a number of years now, the legislature has had problems reaching a budget deal on time. Back in February of 2009, the California budget was already months overdue. In order to get a final necessary vote in the State Senate, Democrats reached a deal with Republican Senator Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria). The deal allowed Maldonado’s Senate Constitutional Amendment 4 (SCA4) to be approved by the State Senate and added to the budget bill.
SCA4 places an open primary measure on the ballot in June 2010. If passed by the voters, this model of open primary would place all candidates for each U.S. Congressional, state legislative, and statewide office seat on the same ballot and allow any registered voter to cast a vote for any candidate, regardless of the declared party of the voter. Candidates could choose to state their political party affiliation on the ballot, but doing so would not be required. The two candidates who receive highest number of votes in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, would then face off in the general election. Even if one candidate were to receive over 50 percent of the votes in the primary, that candidate would not win the seat outright; the top two vote getters would still face off in the general election. Passage of the proposal would not change primary elections for President, party committee offices, and nonpartisan offices.
The general idea behind the measure is that it will make it easier for more moderate candidates to make it through the primary election and into the general election. Under the current system, far-left or far-right candidates play to their base in the primary election. Usually, more extreme candidates tend to win the backing of their party in the primary, leading to fewer moderate candidates making it through to the general election. Accordingly, once those ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative candidates get elected in the general election, the state legislature, for example, is filled with extremely liberal and extremely conservative candidates who have a difficult time working to reach consensus with each other because of their severe differences in political ideology. With an open primary, the idea is that more moderate candidates will be able to appeal to a wider cross-section of the electorate in the primary. The two top vote getters who make it to the general election will thus be likely to be more moderate. With more moderate candidates ultimately getting elected into office, it will make it easier for government officials to reach a consensus on issues.
It should be noted that Abel Maldonado is a moderate Republican. Enactment of an open primary would serve to benefit moderates such as himself, so there is a definite personal agenda at work here. Also, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has stated that he is in favor of an open primary. Supporters argue that an open primary would give voters a greater choice in the primary election, possibly leading to increased voter participation. It’s a noble concept, but things don’t always work out as planned.
There are numerous reasons why I believe the open primary is a bad idea for California. First of all, in many regions of the state where voter registration is heavily skewed in favor of one party, there is a good likelihood that the top two vote getters in the primary could be from the same party. There could be a situation where, say, in a heavily conservative district, two Republican candidates would wind up facing off in the general election. Such a situation would be wonderful if you are a Republican, but it would leave Democrats in that district feeling like they have no candidate who represents their political views in the general election. This could hurt voter turnout. Furthermore, in such heavily skewed districts, potential candidates from the under-represented major party could be reluctant to even run in the first place, fearing that the registration in the area could make it all but impossible to make it to the general election. As a result, many highly-qualified candidates might never even run for office, denying the people the chance to be represented by the best person possible.
Secondly, I like the idea of members of each political party being allowed to choose who represents them and their interests in the general election. I believe registered Democrats have a right to choose the Democrat candidate who best represents their own ideals, and Republicans have a right to choose the Republican candidate who best represents them. These voters have a stated desire for the success of their own party, so they are the ones who can best decide the path their party takes. Of course, this is not to say that a Republican cannot vote for a Democrat or vice-versa if they feel the candidate of the other party is more in line with their beliefs. But I believe that decision is best made by the voter in the general election, not in the primary. The primary is for each party to decide who, amongst their own, best represents them. On a side note, that is why I like the current semi-closed primary system, which allows for voters who decline to state their party affiliation to choose the party for which they want to vote in in the primary election. This allows interested political outsiders to have a role in choosing a candidate in a party in which they might be interested in joining while disallowing people who have a stated opposition to a party from casting a ballot to possibly select an “easier opponent” for their own candidate to face off against in the general election.
And thirdly, while I have never personally voted for a third party candidate in the past, I do recognize that there are segments of the population who do not feel their political ideals are represented by either the Republican or Democrat parties. Under the current system, there are procedures in place to allow third party candidates to make it onto the general election ballot. Under an open primary, the chances of a third party candidate being one of the top two vote getters and making it through to the general election would be virtually nonexistent. As in the case where two candidates from one major political party wind up facing off in the general election would wind up disenfranchising the voters of the other major political party, registered third party voters would also feel like they would not have a candidate who represents their ideals in the general election. This could also hurt voter turnout.
I see no good reason to switch from our current primary system. We cannot allow self-serving politicians such as Abel Maldonado to tinker with the political system simply for personal gain. I strongly urge all voters to reject the proposed constitutional amendment to switch to an open primary in California.
California Legislators Increase Staff Pay
The past year has not been a good one for the United States financially. The State of California has also been hit hard by the economic recession. Decreased tax revenues and an increased demand on social services have put the state in a dire financial situation. In light of the economic reality facing California, the state legislature recently passed a budget that included deep cuts in state spending. This action on their part was absolutely necessary.
But there is something rotten going on in Sacramento. During the first half of this year, several California lawmakers rewarded their employees with pay increases. As the state budget deficit was increasing and many government workers were forced to take furlough days and other pay cuts, at least 87 staff members of the California Assembly, approximately seven percent of the 1,206 employees on their payroll, received combined raises in excess of $430,000. In the State Senate, nine staff members received raises totaling more than $152,000.
In the Assembly, 10 of the pay increases went to Republican staffers and 12 went to security staff employed by the Assembly Rules Committee. The other 65 raises went to employees of Democratic legislators or their committees. Out of the 87 people who received a bump in compensation, 39 staffers received pay increases of 10 percent or more, and 15 of those people got raises of 20 percent or more. In the Senate, seven of the nine staffers who got raises received an increase of 10 percent or more. Out of the total 96 people who received pay increases, five Assembly staffers and two Senate staffers who already made $100,000 or more a year got raises.
According to records obtained under the state Legislative Open Records Act, three of the pay raises went to employees in the office of Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-LA), and three went to staff members of the Democratic caucus she oversees. Assemlywoman Lori Saldana (D-San Diego) handed out the largest pay increase to an individual staff. Her $41,000 in pay increases included 20 percent raises for three of her employees and a 15 percent increase for her chief of staff, Lucy Krohn, bringing her annual salary to $110,640. The Assemblymember who represents the district in which I reside, Majority Leader Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont), gave a raise to one of his employees.
When asked about the pay increases, aides to several members of the Assembly and Senate said some of the pay increases were not raises in the traditional sense. Instead, they characterized the higher pay as extra compensation for employees who were working more hours.
I cannot be the only person enraged by all of this. When the State of California is asking hundreds of thousands of government workers to take a reduction in pay, it is outrageous for members of the state legislature to be handing out generous raises to members of their staffs. And any notions of these pay increase not being raises in the traditional sense of the word is laughable. From my own personal experience in the job that I am currently employed at, workers in the private sector are being forced to take on additional responsibilities these days without any pay increases at all. In fact, many of my co-workers are being forced to take on additional responsibilities at work with the threat of cuts in pay if they do not do so.
People who work in state government should be there for the betterment of society, not to increase their personal wealth. The money spent on the staffs of California state legislators should be tightly controlled. Percentage pay increases to the entire staff of each legislator should not be allowed to exceed pay increases given to state legislators in any given year. If a legislator feels a certain staffer deserves a larger raise, that legislator should be forced to cut costs in other places in their own staff budget to offset the raise. It is time for the spoiled members of the state legislature to step outside their elitist world which insulates them from the harsh realities that face many Californians each and every day.
Health Care Town Hall Debates
I just returned home from my Congressman Pete Stark’s (D-Fremont) town hall meeting on health care in Fremont. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it in to the actual town hall event.
The town hall meeting was scheduled to begin at 9AM, and I arrived at the Fremont Senior Center at around 8:25AM. To my surprise, there was already a huge line snaking around the building and onto the sidewalk. I had never been to a Pete Stark town hall meeting in the past, but from everyone who I talked with, no prior meeting had even come close to having this many people turn out. After I established my position in line, a number of people who knew me said that they would hold my spot in line while I counted how many people were ahead of us. According to my count, I was number 280 in line. At approximately 9:10AM, the doors were officially closed and it was announced that the Senior Center was at capacity. I missed getting in by about 25 people. Another couple hundred people behind me also missed out on the meeting.
The residents of the Fremont area had definitely turned out in force to hear and be heard. Both sides of the health care issue were well represented. I was proud that the residents of my area actually cared enough about an issue to be stirred to action.
As I stated in an earlier post, I want to hold off on commenting specifically about the health care issue until one concrete proposal is up for a vote in Congress. I will say, however, that I do not believe that health care is a right that is guaranteed to everybody. I can find no part in the Constitution that suggests that health care is an industry that the government has a role in being a part of. I also find the notion of the government redistributing wealth from one group to another to be particularly distasteful. As a true conservative, I believe that people should have to work hard to obtain the resources in order to be able to consume luxuries in life. I fully recognize that Medicare is an example of government being involved with health care, but just because something is already happening does not mean that it is right. I do not believe in eliminating Medicare because doing so would be unfair to all the citizens who have paid into it for decades with the expectation of getting something out of it in their old age. I do feel that it is important to point out that Medicare is in severe financial trouble right now, and that is an indication of how poorly and inefficiently the government performs when it comes to running programs. But I want to concentrate on a different aspect of the health care debate right now.
While I was in line, I had an opportunity to speak with a number of the residents of the area. I was also able to listen to the sometimes heated conversations that were going on between others. Okay, that’s incorrect. Many times they weren’t conversations or even debates. Instead, they were simply shouting matches where one side was trying to shout down the other side. Neither side would be listening to the other side, so no constructive dialogue was actually taking place. Each side was firmly entrenched in their beliefs, and they were in such a state of frenzy that no logical ideas could possibly be expected to sink in. For many, it was an exercise in futility.
The thing that bothered me the most while watching these exchanges was that there was an incredible amount of misinformation going on amongst the people. Both sides were misinformed on many aspects of the health care proposals. The most striking thing that occurred to me is that many people were under the mistaken belief that there is one single health care bill that is already up for a vote in both the House and the Senate. This is not the case. The fact is that both the House of Representatives and the Senate have many versions of the bill that are working their way through committees to be voted on. I was amazed at how many people did not understand this basic fact. I actually watched a woman tell a man that there is not only one single health care bill that will be voted on and the man shouted to her that there is only one bill and that it is the final version of the bill. The two of them shouted back and forth for a solid two minutes about this. They weren’t arguing policy; they were arguing about a fact.
If the fire truck in front of me is red, I need to be able to acknowledge that it is, in fact, red. If, as a matter of policy, I want the fire truck to be painted yellow in the future, I can express my reasoning for wanting that to happen. But I at least have to admit the fact that the fire truck is currently red. I can’t spend five minutes arguing that the red truck is currently green. That would be a waste of everyone’s time, and it would wind up making me look foolish. Quite possibly, it would be such a distraction that we would never get to the point in the dialogue where I can make my case on why we need to paint the truck yellow, no matter how good my argument is.
Both while standing in line and in the short time after the doors were officially closed to the town hall event, I did what I could to talk to people and try to clear up all the misinformation that I was witnessing. But there are only so many people that I can talk to in small groups of two or three at a time. I would like to think that I am a level-headed and intelligent person. I am fair, and I can usually see the reasoning behind both sides of an issue. This doesn’t mean that I can’t clearly take one position or the other, but at least I can understand what the thought processes are by all sides. If I were in a position of prominence, I feel like I could be able to cut through the clutter more easily and get the dialogue moving from a common point where the facts are clearly understood by everyone. Once that factual basis is established, constructive dialogue and debate can actually begin on policy issues. Until we get to that point, we are going to continue shouting at each other instead of listening to one another.
California’s 2009-2010 Budget
As of July 1, 2009, the California state legislature was late in passing a 2009-2010 fiscal year budget. This is not the first time the legislature has been late in passing a budget. As a result of their inability to get a budget passed by June 30, the state’s budget deficit rose from $24 billion to $26.3 billion. The problem had gotten so bad that the state had to resort to issuing billions of dollars in IOU’s to many state contractors in order to stave off a cash crisis. Finally, on July 25, almost a month late, the state legislature managed to pass a new budget. Unfortunately, the budget they passed still fell $1.1 short of being balanced.
A little over a week ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the 27-bill budget-balancing package into law. Before doing so, Schwarzenegger used the line-item veto to make an additional $489 million in spending cuts. The Governor had to do so because the budget that the legislature gave to him left the state with a depleted rainy day fund. Schwarzenegger rightfully felt the need to replenish that fund to ensure the state’s ability to respond to emergencies. At the end of the day, California has an $85 billion budget for 2009-2010.
In order to balance the budget, about $15.5 billion came by way of cuts. Education took the biggest hit, with $6 billion cut from K-12 education and $2.8 billion taken from higher education. MediCal services were cut by $1.3 billion, the corrections department faces an “unallocated” $1.2 billion in cuts, and three major welfare programs (CalWORKs’ Welfare-to-Work program, In-Home Supportive Services, and the Children's Health Insurance Program) face $878 million in cuts.
A total of $3.4 billion dollars was created through one-time raids on local government funding. A proposal to allow additional oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast in exchange for $100 million this year (and $1.8 billion in the next decade or so) was defeated in the Assembly.
This is where things start getting tricky with the budget. Another $1.7 billion was saved by speeding up tax withholdings on individuals and businesses. And by deferring state employee paychecks by one day (from June 30 to July 1, 2010), the state saved $1.2 billion in the 2009-2010 budget.
There is a problem here. Significant amounts of money have been created through accounting gimmicks. The process of smoke and mirrors used by the California state legislature is not sustainable. Speeding up tax withholdings and deferring paychecks only pushed the problem off into the next fiscal year. Money taken from local governments will have to be repaid. Eventually, reality will catch up to us, and we will be facing a problem that will be even more difficult to deal with.
Of course, this is already assuming that the tax revenue projections used in the budget are even remotely close to being accurate. There is a very real possibility that the rosy estimates used in the budget could overestimate true revenues by $10 billion or more. This is going to leave us with an almost impossible situation to deal with both next year and in upcoming years.
Realistically, the woeful inadequacy of the budget recently signed into law will become glaringly obvious far sooner than next summer. I predict that by late fall or early winter, legislators will once again realize how inept they have been at their jobs and will begin taking measures to attempt to stop the bleeding. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope they are finally able to take real actions that can lead to a stable California going forward.
Expungement of Voting Records in California State Assembly
A few weeks ago, 28 members of the California State Assembly voted to support a measure to allow additional drilling from an existing oil platform at Tranquillon Ridge off the Santa Barbara coast. 48 Assembly members, almost all the Democrats, voted against it. After the measure failed, leaders in the Assembly expunged the vote from the official state database. As a result, the voting logs on the Assembly’s website no longer show who voted for or against the bill. A printout of the vote was available to those in the Assembly chamber until Majority Leader Alberto Torrico (D-Newark) made a motion to expunge the vote. Torrico declined to comment on the issue. Other Democrats argue that the action to expunge was advanced by Assembly Minority Leader San Blakeslee (R-San Luis Obispo), but his office denied that he was behind it.
Another example of removing voting records occurred last year when the Assembly voted on a bill that would have reduced the punishment for crack cocaine crimes and increased the punishment for powder cocaine violations. The text of that bill stated its intent was “to eliminate the racially disparate impact of existing law.” Yet another final vote that was expunged from the record occurred on a bill that would have created an independent commission to revise some criminal penalties. That vote was controversial because law enforcement groups felt it would lead to overall weaker punishments, which they opposed.
The little-known practice of expunging votes in the State Assembly has been used on 71 different votes in the past six years. There is little purpose to this practice other than to allow lawmakers to hide their votes from the public and avoid leaving any trace of their decision on the official record that could possibly be used against them when running for reelection.
A bill cannot become law without an official record on the vote. Some Assembly officials support the practice of expunging voting records, saying that only a tiny fraction of the approximately 5,000 votes that take place in a typical two-year session are purged from the record. They also say there are instances when a vote on a bill is expunged, but the same bill is voted on again later for the record and passes. According to Assembly Speaker Karen Bass’ (D-Los Angeles) spokeswoman Shannon Murphy, “Though it’s rare, occasionally the procedural step of expunging a vote is necessary.” She went on further to say that the procedure can be used to allow “further discussion and negotiation that may ultimately lead to consensus on a contentious issue.”
This is absolutely ridiculous. As a matter of policy, the State Assembly should not be allowed to expunge any voting records. Our elected officials should be responsible to the public for their actions. To remove traces of voting history in order to make reelection easier for incumbents is dishonest. It is a cover-up, plain and simple. Our elected officials should be forced to face the consequences of their actions, and their voting records should forever be available to the public.
Please visit my official campaign website at:
www.Shahab2010.com