California

The summit is wrapping up with a presentation from attorney Andrew Giacomini, managing partner of Hanson Bridgett, explaining the legal strategy for calling a constitutional convention without the participation of the legislature.

"Everything I'm telling you is subject to debate," Giacomini says, but he is pretty emphatic that he's right. Such a convention can be called with two initiatives. At first, probably in June 2010, backers of a convention could put an initiative on the ballot that would amend the constitution to permit the people to call a convention directy, without the participation of the legislature. He anticipates legal and political opposition, but isn't worried. "I think that's about as hard as fogging up a mirror with my breath," he says. The second initiative would ask the public to call the convention, and set out the agenda and the delegate selection options. This initiative could appear on the November 2010 ballot -- or on the June 2010 ballot alongside the first initiative.

He also outlined four possible approaches to how to pick delegates. 1. a direct election of delegates in existing districts (the current constitutional process), 2. a Prop 11-style approach, with a citizens commission. 3. a jury pool style approach, with citizens called at random, and 4. a process that includes a panel of experts. He doesn't suggest a favorite, but says a decision has to be made.

Several speakers at the convention summit have raised the following program: how would such a convention engage a California public that is famously disengaged?

No one has a great solution. (There was a little talk about the Internet and Obama-style organizing). But the difficulty of engaging citizens is itself a strong argument for a constitutional convention. The convention itself would be so novel that, with a little bit of show biz (some ceremony, and you know your blogger's weakness for powdered wigs), it would attract attention and might, at the very least, teach people about their state and how it currently works. For the educational value alone, a convention might be worth having.

I'm borrowing the title of this post from a terrific book by Duke Political Science Professor John Aldrich. 

It poses a good question, one that we cannot afford to lose sight of as we think about political reform on a grand scale in California. 

Why Parties? 

The answer is that our government would be unworkable without them.

Legislators use parties to coordinate their actions. The Founders decried the influence of faction but quickly found that groups that banded together in the legislature dominated those who didn't.  Order trumps chaos.  

And it turns out that this order is very useful.  Voters employ party labels to evaluate the results of coordinated actions by members of their government.  If these actions work as planned - to lower the unemployment rate for example - members of that party stay in office.  If they don't, the party gets thrown out.  

This is called accountability.*  It's the cornerstone of any democratic system. 

Steven Hill’s excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times usefully corrects sloppy media descriptions of the “gang” primary measure that Sen. Abel Maldonado extorted out of the Legislature as the price of doing his budget duty. I would go one step further: this measure would end the idea of “party primaries” as we know them.

One of the most exciting things about the California Constitutional Convention Summit that The New America Foundation is co-sponsoring with the Bay Area Council next Tuesday is that it has the potential to act as a channel for focusing and combining the efforts of different political reform campaigns.  Many of these have similar goals but are operating on parallel tracks. 

For example, last fall Mark Paul and I drafted a proposal to radically reorder California legislative elections into a system of region-based proportional representation.  One element of this plan  was increasing the size of the state legislature from 120 representatives in two houses to 360 in one unicameral body.

At the very same time, a California voter named Michael Warnken was filing a detailed brief in a federal court in Sacramento. His suit claims that the massive size of California's legislative districts - greater than 400,000 people for each seat in the lower house - constitutes grossly inadequate and hence illegally poor representation for the state's citizens.  At a hearing last month, a federal judge refused to dismiss the case.  You can find out more about his efforts here at his site, California Commonwealth.

With Californians competing with almost half a million of their fellow citizens to get the attention even of the members of the State Assembly, how can their voices be heard?

If anyone needs further proof that California is not quite a republic, look at the budget deal that appears to have saved the state from a fiscal disaster. (At least for now -- we could be at the brink again if the economy continues its downward march and state tax revenues slip even further below the current estimates).

The deal requires citizens to pass judgment on seven related ballot measures (At one point, a possible deal looked like there might be eight ballot measures, but in last-minute negotiations, it was decided that one measure--that would have involved docking the pay of lawmakers when they don't pass a budget on time -- was unconstitutional).

The Bay Area Council couldn't have picked a better time to convene the February 24 California Constitutional Convention Summit. With so many Californians disgusted by the behavior they have just witnessed at the State Capitol, this is truly, as we parents have learned to call it, the teachable moment.

California had no good budget choices. When states, because of economic slumps, face deficits and must balance their budgets, their actions inevitably put a drag on spending and jobs, deepening the recession.

But the final California budget, and the process that produced it––secretive, dominated by special interests, unnecessarily prolonged––once again showed Californians how badly broken the governance and budget systems are.

At the very end of this Wall Street Journal story on Texas businessman R. Allen Stanford, who is being investigated for fraud and whose empire is being seized by the federal government, comes this bit of news: the politician at the state level who received the most from Stanford was former California Gov. Gray Davis. Among the donations was $100,000 to defeat the 2003 recall.

Blood, sweat, and billions have gone toward studying whether different care delivery models can improve health outcomes of the chronically ill while holding down costs. A recent set of Medicare disease management pilot programs with these twin goals showed, at best, uneven results. As previously noted in this space, only three, including a promising one in Pennsylvania, have been extended beyond their initial periods. Even these programs did no yet reduce overall costs of care for the chronically ill. The key word in that last sentence is "yet."

We must not be fickle in funding delivery system innovation. Politicians and the general public have microscopic attention spans and wildly unrealistic expectations as to how quickly new health care programs can fulfill their promise. This is particularly problematic for innovations that deal with the management of chronic diseases. The problem is compounded when patients are poor, uninsured or underinsured and suffer from illnesses that were undertreated if they were treated at all. As detailed below, the state of California is discovering this at the outset of a major public investment in pilot programs focused on these populations.

Beyond questions of effective long-term stewardship of scarce public resources, there are real human costs to short-lived serial infatuation with new pilot programs. We nearly all believe that a real and ongoing relationship between patient and provider is paramount to quality medical care, yet we often reshuffle which federal program people qualify for and what care facilities they can access. Ideally patients should have some stability and consistency of access points, particularly within a system that can seem byzantine and impenetrable even to those who study health policy for a living.

California is among the states currently experiencing mind-bending budgetary shortfalls. Eventually returning to a period of wealth wisely will depend on fixing health care systems that were strained to a breaking point even before the crisis began. Here are some highlights from an event on Monday that The New America Foundation's Next Social Contract Program and its California Program co-hosted at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco: "California, the Crisis, and the Next Social Contract: Staying Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise in Challenging Times." (We'll link to the webcast when it's available in a few days.)

Reinventing Government guru David Osborne kicked off the event with a presentation that laid out starkly how, unless brought under control, spiraling health spending will keep the states in permanent fiscal crises. Throughout the rest of the morning, the issue of health care costs kept rearing its head in panels on topics from economic development to education. As it turns out, making progress on any policy issue of importance to state governments will first require getting these costs under control.