The main races to watch are:

• Superintendent of public instruction, between union ally Tom Torlakson and reformer Marshall Tuck.
• Several California races for U.S. Congress, which will help decide the size of the expected Republican majority in the House.
• Several state Senate and Assembly races, which will decide if the Democrats regain their two-chamber supermajority, allowing them to massively increases taxes willy-nilly.
• Ballot initiatives, including Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion bond measure.

Remember: This is a democracy, so as they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often.

That's because, as our commentator Steve Mehlman put it:

“The conswervatives are looking to overturn a law passed by Congress, signed by the President, ruled Constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and affirmed by the majority of American voters in the 2012 election.”

But wait a minute. “Congress” has two parts. One part is elected nationally by democratic voting: the U.S. House — which is the one that's wants to get rid of Obamacare (at least so far)!

The other part of “Congress” is the U.S. Senate, which is undemocratically elected by state. Voters in Wyoming, population 576,412, have the same two senators as California, with 38 million people. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against basing state legislatures on such undemocratic processes; why hasn't the court ruled the U.S. Senate unconstitutional because undemocratic?

As to the “U.S. Supreme Court,” it is an unelected, non-democratic body of nine lawyers. Which raises a similar question: Why doesn't the court rule itself as unconstitutional because undemocratic?

Thus, it seems that, contrary to Time magazine's contention, it is majority rule in action in the House, but not elsewhere.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and famous author, titles his column, “Our Democracy Is at Stake”:

This time is different. What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule. President Obama must not give in to this hostage taking — not just because Obamacare is at stake, but because the future of how we govern ourselves is at stake.

He is echoed on CNN by two professors of government in an article titled, “GOP shutdown's extremism worst in U.S. history.” It's by Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor of modern American history at the University of New Hampshire; and Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and director of the Scholars Strategy Network. They echo Friedman:

The federal government shutdown is a virtually unprecedented move by a political minority committed to rolling back one of the most significant legislative achievements in recent American history. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed by two houses of Congress after 14 months of debate. Opponents then challenged the law's constitutionality and lost that battle in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Less than five months later, American voters re-elected by a 5 million-vote majority margin a president who stood foursquare behind the Affordable Care Act. In so doing, the electorate rejected a GOP presidential candidate who promised its repeal.

Apparently the democratic processes by which Americans make choices and govern themselves are not acceptable to extremists in the House of Representatives who seek to halt government or have their way. They would have Americans see their actions as a patriotic and high-minded defense of liberty. As the shutdown loomed, several GOP congressmen and analysts took to the airwaves to trivialize the significance of the House vote.

A republic, not a democracy

Actually, as these eminent commentators must know, the Founders did not establish a pure democracy, but a republic. The Supreme Court is appointed, not elected. U.S. senators are elected by state, not by population; California has 66 times as many people as Wyoming, but both states get only two senators. The president is not elected by majority vote, but by the Electoral College. The several states still retain at least some authority within from our national “democracy.”

But aside from those points, the authors' claim that the Tea Party's actions are “undemocratic” contradicts some obvious things. First, the U.S. House of Representatives is the most democratic part of the government because it is elected on the basis of population after the decennial U.S. Census. The Founders made it so all tax bills must originate in the House, the branch of government “closest to the people.”

If Obamacare could be implemented by democracy in the House in 2010, how is it any less “democratic” if it is repealed, in whole or part, by the House in 2013?

Second, Friedman and the two ladies insist that the Tea Party has become a tyranny overthrowing democracy. Actually, the Tea Party is an amorphous movement that has strong influence, at best, on 40 percent of GOP representatives and maybe 20 percent of GOP senators. And since the Republicans have a bit more than half the representation in the House, the Tea Party has, at most, influence over about 22 percent of all 435 representatives.

If the Tea Party members of Congress end up prevailing, it will be because they made convincing arguments, rallied support for their cause among the voters in other (non-Tea Party) districts, or both. In other words, if the Tea Party somehow wins, it will be through democratic action.

2,407 pages

Third, despite Friedman and the learned professors bringing up “democracy,” Obamacare, if implemented, actually will be beyond democracy — it will become another gargantuan bureaucracy implemented by faceless, undemocratic functionaries. The original implementing legislation in 2010 extended to 2,407 pages of unreadable governmentese. Here's a screen shot of p. 2407. See if even this snippet makes any sense to you. And if a government act doesn't make sense to regular voters — the demos — how can it be “democratic”?

No wonder then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, famously said just before Obamcare passed, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it.” How “democratic” was that? Perhaps Friedman and the professors can inform us. Here's the YouTube of Pelosi:

Bureaucracy

Fourth, the bureaucracy now is taking over and adding multiples more regulations, none approved by the Congress or the people of the United States:

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — Some fundamentalist Christians take the “Greatest Story Ever Told” and make it so unpalatable that it sends seekers running in the other direction. Likewise, some of my fellow liberty lovers take the greatest political and economic system ever devised and make it sound so parsimonious that it causes people run for some government agency.

Last week, on Independence Day, we celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, but what we really were celebrating was the unique vision upon which our society was founded, even if it isn’t always “sold” to the public in an easily understood and appealing way.

There are two basic visions of society. In the one that dominated human societies throughout most of history, a small group of people impose their will on everyone else by the threat of violence. Submit or be imprisoned, re-educated, killed or expelled. The leaders have unlimited and ultimate authority, although such governments vary by degree of awfulness. Not every authoritarian system is run by Khmer Rouges or Visigoths.

In the other vision, all people — by the nature of their birth — have fundamental rights. The government’s only job is to protect those rights. The State is designed to serve as a referee to assure that people don’t rob, defraud or otherwise harm others; to sort out the inevitable disputes that result given the human condition; and perhaps to provide some services (i.e., infrastructure) not easily provided by the private sector.

Flawed, but still very much worth celebrating

Those who are unduly critical of American society are missing the key point. Of course, the founding fathers were hypocritical and human. Of course, our society falls short of its ideals. Of course, we no longer are really free. Try to defy the government’s edicts and you will feel no safer than Edward Snowden, the asylum-seeking (Venezuela or Russia, anyone?) former defense contractor who had leaked embarrassing documents about NSA spying programs.

But looking at the course of human history, it has been the rarest society that has tried to follow the second course. Why does the United States remain among the most prosperous and harmonious nations on Earth? It’s not because of the IRS, Obamacare, the FBI or any other government agency or program. It’s because of the free-market system, combined with a political system that checks and balances the power of the authorities. This is such a sure-fire creator of wealth and happiness that we do well even running on its fumes.

That’s worth celebrating, even though this system’s successes are not enough for those many people who turn to that thing called government to give them whatever it is they want. But, as the old saying goes, any government big enough to give you whatever you want also is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.

Critics of the free market argue that it’s based on greed, but let’s compare, on a personal level, how markets and the government work. The public school system, for instance, is a government-funded and controlled monopoly. Let’s say your kids are in terrible schools and you want them to be taught somewhere else.

You have three basic choices: Pay a second tuition (you’ve already paid the first one through your taxes) and send them to a private school. Move to another community with a better school district. Spend your time ousting the current school board, overcoming well-funded union opposition and electing new members who might hire better administrators. That could consume your entire life and there’s virtually no chance of success.

Let’s say the schools operated in a market system. The fix is simple. You would shop around for better schools and possibly have the problem solved by the weekend. If you don’t like what General Motors offers in its car product, you don’t devote yourself to changing the company’s board and reviving its product line. You go to the auto mall and buy a Dodge or a Toyota.

Democracy and free markets: making distinctions

Free markets are about voluntary exchange. You and I negotiate over the price of things. If we don’t agree on terms, we part ways as friends or perhaps enemies, but we can’t force the other person to submit to our terms or else we end up in prison.

I’m ruminating about markets and not about “democracy.” Democracy probably is a better way of electing leaders than by hereditary monarchy or military junta, but it refers only to the way that leaders come to power. I would rather live under a king in a system with the rule of law and due process than in a democracy where the majority was keen on the Muslim Brotherhood.

We should resolve to explain the importance of our freedoms to our friends and neighbors in a kind and personal way. Free societies are prosperous, fair and humane. That’s what was worth celebrating last week amid the fireworks and parades.

Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Write to him at steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

By John Seiler

Just four more day to D-Day — Democracy Day. Then this dreadful election finally will be over.

If the ancient Greeks could have seen how things would have turned out, instead of inventing democracy, they would have drunk the hemlock rather than forcing it on Socrates.

The lying campaigns even are hurting our children. Here’s one with an opinion shared by most Americans:

We expect all sides in politics to fight hard, given the stakes involved, but our system rests on the broad acceptance of a set of fairly applied rules. We know, for instance, that no matter how nasty the coming presidential election becomes, the loser ultimately will cede power after the final count is in. This isn’t a kleptocracy, where the only redress for the losing side is to take to the streets in a violent revolt.

Unfortunately, California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ recent misuse of power to provide a dishonest ballot title and summary for proposed pension-reform initiatives, which she opposes, comes right out of the totalitarian playbook, where those wielding power recognize no rules of decency or fairness.

We expect judges, no matter their political stripes, to apply the law as written. We expect election officials to battle election fraud no matter their personal preference for the outcome. Likewise, we expect state attorneys general, who are the head of California’s “Justice” Department, after all, to provide fair title and summaries of all initiatives submitted to that office — even ones the AG personally doesn’t like. Without any civic spiritedness, people eventually will lose faith that they can make change by following the rules.

Harris, however, is a close ally of the public sector unions. And she has designs on higher office. Those unions have an iron grip on Sacramento politics, and they are doing all they can to stop the burgeoning pension reform movement. So when California Pension Reform submitted two initiatives that would rein in the unsustainable costs of the state’s pension system, Harris decided to behave as a political operative and besmirch the office she holds by distorting the official descriptions that most voters rely upon when making their voting decision.

In January, she titled the reform measures: “Reduces pensions for public employees.” That’s flat-out wrong. Her summary was filled with distortions meant to sway voters against them. As result, last week the pension reform group dropped the initiative. They couldn’t raise the $2 million needed to gather the signatures given the overwhelming obstacle Harris put in their way.

This never was going to be a fair fight. Unions would have outspent pension reformers by many multiples, but union supporters don’t want to take any chances given the growing pension backlash.

It’s certainly OK to hire a Democratic hack to wage a slash-and-burn anti-reform campaign, as the unions already have been doing, but it’s another thing to abuse the power of the state’s highest law-enforcement officer and rig the process.

Brown Reform

Now that the pension reform measure is dead, union allies in the Legislature are saying that Gov. Jerry Brown’s modest pension reform measures also are dead. As the San Diego Union-Tribune explained, one main fear the unions had was that the initiatives would give the governor leverage to force his reforms through the Democratic-controlled, union-friendly Legislature. You don’t want my reforms? the governor could ask. Then you’ll be stuck with tougher reforms at the ballot.

That leverage is gone.

Right-leaning blogger Chris Reed wrote on Calwhine.com, “There are plenty of signs that many … liberals were quite willing to believe that pensions are far too generous for public employees. But not union thug Kamala Harris. She’s in the tank for the union status quo. This is only the start of how the state government is rigged against the interests of regular Californians.”

Reed wasn’t the only one appalled by this increasingly rigged system.

The Modesto Bee’s liberal editorial page opined that pension reformers are “right about the Harris title and summary. Her office’s official description of the two measures read like talking points taken straight from a public employee union boss’ campaign handbook. Harris claimed the measures would reduce retirement income for current employees, which is not true. She also claimed that future government employees would lose survivor and death benefits, also not true.”

Selective List

The Harris summary also described supposed “cuts” to “teachers, nurses and peace officers, but excluding judges.” That’s campaign rhetoric, not the dispassionate description of a fair-minded AG.

As the reformers explained in their statement, “The AG selectively lists three positive poll-tested jobs out of thousands of government employee job classifications when both measures apply to all public employees, except constitutionally protected judges.” The San Diego Union-Tribune, referring to a pension system that is consuming upward of 30 percent of municipal budgets, complained about “Kamala Harris’ dirty trick on California.”

Ironically, these proposed initiatives were far from radical. They offered alternative plans for newly hired state employees as a way to rein in an unfunded pension liability, or debt, that is estimated as high as a half-trillion dollars by a Stanford University study. One measure would have put new workers only in a defined-contribution, 401(k)-style plan. The alternative would have created a hybrid plan that mixed the current defined-benefit pension with the 401(k)-type program.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said in its analysis that the initiatives wouldn’t have achieved savings for many years. By focusing on new hires, the initiatives wouldn’t save too much until these new workers start retiring. That would argue for a tougher reform, but the state’s unions and their newfound heroine, Harris, want to block all reform.

California cities are facing potential bankruptcy, localities are cutting services, and there’s much pressure for tax hikes in an already highly taxed state to pay for public employee pensions that are far more generous than those typically earned in the private sector. The problem is real, and the situation is unfair to taxpayers.

It’s made even more unfair by the tactics of an attorney general who is happy to distort the democratic process to do the bidding of a special interest group that already has nearly unchecked power in the Capitol.

Don’t be surprised if more Californians lose faith in their ability to effect meaningful change.

– Steven Greenhut

State senate Republicans continue to be pressed to sell out and vote to put a tax-increase on a special June ballot.

They should resist the temptation.

The real problem remains profligate state spending from the Davis-Schwarzenegger years. The solution is not to gouge Californians yet again with new taxes that would slam each California family for another $5,000 over the next five years.

The solution is to cut the waste in government, beginning with lavish pensions to current and even retired government workers.

Is it short-circuiting democracy to not have a vote, as Brown and others maintain? No. We’ve had plenty of elections lately. We don’t need them several times a year at the whim of the governor.

But if he wants elections, how about also putting on the ballot:

1. Tax cuts.

2. Pension reform.

3. A restoration of the Gann Limit on spending.

Failing to do so, while giving voters only the option of destroying the state even more with economy-killing tax increases, would be a mockery of democracy.

March 14, 2011

by JOHN SEILER

“All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy,” said Al Smith, the New York governor and presidential candidate in 1928 (pictured at right). He was the last small-government Democratic presidential candidate  in the Thomas Jefferson-Grover Cleveland tradition.

Unfortunately, Smith lost to big-government, protectionist Republican Herbert Hoover, who plunged America, and the world, into the Great Depression. The next president was big-government, big-spend, big-tax Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who prlonged the Great Depression for another decade and imposed the socialist programs and mentality that now have bankrupted America.

Fast-forward to 2011: Gov. Jerry Brown wants a vote of the people on his $12 billion tax-increase proposal. He has accused Republicans who oppose such a vote of being anti-democratic, on Monday in his State-of-the-State address even comparing them to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Yet Brown now is rejecting Republican calls to put a tax cut on the ballot next to his tax increase.  “You’ve got to get real here. Don’t say I’m going to solve this problem by creating a bunch of new problems that we’ll have even more trouble handling,” Brown huffed.

But what about democracy? Denying the people of California the right to vote on tax cuts,  make Brown like dictator Mubarak – hypocritical.

This Mubarakian anti-democratic posture is reason enough to recall Brown, just as we did his ex-chief of staff, Gov. Gray Davis, back in 2003. And with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ineligible to run because of term limits, maybe as new governor we’d get somebody better than Herr Shriver-Kennedy.

And let’s not limit the vote just to Brown’s immense tax-increase idea and the Republicans’ tax-cut idea. Give voters a smorgasbord of choices. Let’s have these votes, too:

* Bring back the Gann Limit, which limited increases in state spending to the increases in population and inflation. It would have prevented the demented spending increases of the Davis-Schwarzenegger decade. Voters, tricked into thinking they were promoting the building of roads, voted effectively to repeal the Gann Limit  in 1990 with Prop. 111. Give voters another chance to restore this essential budget control.

* Give voters a choice in what departments are cut. For example, Prop. X might read, “Cut education spending 5 percent.” Prop. Y might read, “Cut education spending 10 percent.” Prop. Z might read, “Cut government-worker pensions by 5 percent.” And so on.

* Put on the ballot a measure amending the California Constitution to get rid of the guaranteed payment of pension funds to retirees. According to a Stanford University study, California’s residents — even little children just born — are on the hook for $500 billion in liabilities to the retirees. If the pension fund investments don’t perform well, then the money comes from the general fund. Why should a manual laborer in Jose’s Muffler Shop be forced to pay for the $200,000 retirement of a government worker? That’s just not fair. Let voters decide whether they want to make it fair.

* End public employee retirees’ health benefits when they turn 65 and qualify for Social Security; sooner if they qualify for some other health-care benefit, such as that of military retirees. A U.S. General Accounting Office study found that these costs could be even more than pension costs.

* Go back to a part-time Legislature, which we had until the late 1960s, and begin a two-year budget cycle. Texas enjoys that and the state is thriving as California stagnates. Would such a change be anti-democratic? Just the opposite. Under the current system, legislators spend far too much time in the hothouse of the state capitol, where they are corrupted by the special-interest lobbyists. If, instead, they meet for only three months every two years, they’ll have to spend the rest of their time with real people back in their districts, finding out what’s going on — and even get real jobs to pay their family bills. Democracy demands citizen-legislators, who take a couple of months off every two years from their businesses, jobs or farms to conduct the people’s business — not full-time hacks beholden to those who stuff money in their pockets.

That’s just a start. Give the people a choice, Jerry — a real democratic choice.