Schwarzenegger Goes Down in Flames

It is 12:30AM and I am up doing some work, scanning the ongoing results of tonight's special election here in California. Amazingly, it is beginning to look as though not a single ballot initiative passed. This is unheard of. Proposition 73, which would require parental notification before a minor has an abortion -- this has to be the biggest no-brainer of all time -- is even failing to pass. More tellingly, of the 4 propositions that Governor Schwarzenegger got onto the ballot and pushed hard for the last couple of months, every one is going down.

This is bad, bad news for the governor and for the state. California has been in financial trouble the last few years due to crazy overspending by the Democratic-controlled legislature. Until a year ago we also had an incompetent Democratic governor, Gray Davis, who basically rubber-stamped every piece of pork to come through the legislature. The liberals ran the state and we were headed for bankruptcy.

Davis wound up overextending himself by mis-handling the electricity crisis, raising the auto registration fees by a huge amount (alienating every constituency), and signing a driver's-license-for-illegal-immigrants bill that most of the state did not support. He got tossed out on his ear in a special election, shortly after winning re-election. Out with the liberal, in with the moderate Republican (my choice, Tom McClintock, evidently was way too conservative to get elected). Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected by promising to reform the government and get spending under control.

After he got elected, he went to the Democrats in the legislature and basically said, "look, there's a new sheriff in town..." The liberal Democrats, predictably, laughed at him and ridiculed him in the press. You might remember Arnold's "girlie man" comment that got him into hot water in the press (he was referring to the liberals in the legislature). But Schwarzenegger had said during his campaign that, if elected, he would try to work with the politicians, but if they wouldn't play ball, he would go around them and go straight to the citizens through ballot initiatives.

Using this threat once he got into office, Schwarzenegger proved to be formidable. He forced the legislature to change workers' compensation laws that were destroying businesses in California; he repealed Davis's car tax; he got the legislature to get rid of the illegal immigrant license bill that had passed; he killed a proposal to amend the state's "3-strikes"; etc. In short, he was very effective and the legislature had to step back a bit when he would threaten.

This Fall he pushed 4 propositions: 74, 75, 76, and 77. These were all designed to REFORM the state government, in different ways:

Prop 74 would change the current law that says that public school teachers, who currently only have to work for 2 years before getting "tenure" -- basically a lifetime job -- would have to instead work for 5 years first. When you consider that California public schools rank near the bottom in academic performance in the country, clearly reform of some kind is necessary. The whole idea of tenure for public school teachers to me seems ridiculous just to start with. College professors are one thing, but elementary and high school teachers?? Why on earth would we want them to have guaranteed jobs? My boss can fire me any time he wants to, and the threat of that keeps me working hard every day. Why should teachers be any different? To put this in perspective, the L.A. Times stated that of the 30,000 teachers employed by the horrible LAUSD, in the past 10 years a grand total of 12 have been fired. How afraid of losing their jobs do you think teachers are? Anyway, this proposition is losing by 5 percentage points.

Prop 75 tries to cut down on the power of special interest groups in Sacramento by requiring public employee unions to get their members' permission to spend their union dues on political campaigns before they spend them. Basically you have union members who may support the governor on any given issue, but the dues they are required to pay to their union (which can and often are raised at will) go to support political smear campaigns against the governor. If I were a teacher with a conservative nature, I would be furious that my money was being spent in this way. The California Teachers Association is one of the most powerful special interest groups in Sacramento and oppose the governor every time he turns around. They get popular support by claiming they're out there "for the children," when in fact they are out there for the teachers. California teachers have an excellent pension system that allows them to retire early on the public dime, simultaneously costing taxpayers a fortune and removing the most qualified teachers from the system. The passage of Proposition 75 would severely impair the CTA's ability to continue to influence legislators in the state capitol. Yet this bill is going down 52-48.

Prop 76 changes the requirements of the legislature to pass a spending bill within the means of the state Treasury (they have a habit of borrowing whatever they need); it also gives the governor some authority, subject to legislature approval, to make spending cuts mid-year, before deficits get ugly and corner everyone in the next budget cycle. This prop is going down hard, 61-39.

Finally, Prop 77 authorizes the redrawing of legislative districts throughout the state, by a panel of 3 retired non-partisan judges. State elections almost never result in an incumbent getting thrown out of office, because the district lines are drawn in such a way that there really is no competition. As a result, each district tends to elect a more "extreme" individual, and so you get hard-left liberals from some districts and hard-right conservatives in others. They are so far apart, idealogically, that they will never see eye-to-eye and thus the "compromise" deals that should be happening up there don't happen. With 77 passing, the districts would be competitive and elections would be much less predictable. In theory, also, more "moderate" legislation would come out of Sacramento. Proposition 77 is losing 58-42.

With the loss of all these propositions, the Democratic legislature will no longer fear the governor. Without a credible threat of going straight to the people, making the legislators irrelevant, the governor will effectively be impotent; a lame duck.

Conservatives' hopes for reforming the state government are going down in flames. Tune in in a few years and see whether the liberal legislature has bankrupted California yet; or whether there are any businesses left in the state; or whether our school system is actually graduating a majority of the kids who go through it. If these election results are any indication, we're in for a world of hurt...