Jerry Brown

Good politicians have the ability to appear to be on both sides of an issue, but Jerry Brown -- the former governor and presidential candidate, and the current attorney general of California -- is breaking new ground in this realm. Try to follow this: Brown, a likely candidate for governor in 2010, is supportive of same-sex marriage politically. But before the state supreme court, he's defending Prop 8, the just-approved initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California. At the same time, he's defending the marriages of approximately 18,000 gay couples who took the plunge in the past five months, while such unions were legal.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown, a likely candidate for governor in 2010, has indicated support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. But a recent lawsuit by supporters of gay marriage seeks to knock the initiative that would ban such marriages off the November ballot. One argument of the lawsuit is that the official title and summary Brown's office gave the measure is wrong, because of the Supreme Court decision legalizing such marriages.

The original title and summary said the initiative would not change state law and would not have any fiscal impact because the way marriages are conducted would not be altered; after the court decision legalized same sex marriage, that was no longer true.

But that title and summary were written months before the court decision. In an amicus brief filed with the court, the attorney general's office defends itself along these lines and argues that an initiative cannot be thrown off the ballot because a subsequent court decision changes its meaning.

The LA Times' Maura Dolan explains some of this here.

And the brief is attached here. (Hat tip Kevin Norte.)

Here's my attempt, at Fox and Hounds, to expand on a post from last week. It turns out there is one governor more opposed to tax increases than Arnold.

The current governor and the once (and future?) governor have had a warm relationship, campaigning together for municipal finance protections and against changes in the state's three strikes law. But Monday, during a long Schwarzeneggerian soliloquy at a Riverside event to promote his rainy day fund proposal, the governor took a shot at Brown in response to a question from a Southern California Gas official about the state's infrastructure problems. Here's the direct Arnold quote in the transcript, in full context:

"Well, California for 40 years has not really rebuilt our infrastructure in water, so we have now the stuff that was done under Governor Brown from the '60s. Not Jerry Brown, but Pat Brown, because Jerry Brown did not build infrastructure. They stopped building infrastructure when Reagan came in and so Pat Brown was the last one that built infrastructure. And so, since then our population has gone from 18 million to 38 million but we haven't built any new infrastructure. So, you still have the same water delivery system, we still have the same amount of reservoirs that are now between 50 and 75 percent down. We're running out of water, so there's a major problem."

Over the last two weeks of October 2004, Gov. Schwarzenegger and billionaire Henry Nicholas led a campiagn to defeat Prop 66, a ballot initiative that would have eased some of the most onerous parts of California's "three strikes" law. With Schwarzenegger's campaigning and Nicholas' money, the "no" campaign made political history, taking an initiative that seemed certain to pass and sending it to a shocking defeat. The "no" vote grew by nearly 30 points in two weeks. Independent pollsters say they have never seen such dramatic movement in a ballot initiative.

In the recent California Supreme Court case, the office of Attorney General Jerry Brown defended the state's ban on same-sex marriage. But Brown indicated this week that with the court's ruling, he is effectively switching sides and is opposing any attempts to delay the implementation of the ruling.