“The California Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 this week that the state Legislature has the authority to ask voters whether the Legislature should propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,” as the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial.

A complex ruling

Opinion has swiftly split on the wisdom of allowing a statewide vote on a political position rather than a piece of law. The San Jose Mercury News observed that the court “for the most part upheld the state Legislature’s power to put nonbinding, advisory measures on the ballot — allowing state politicians to essentially test the waters on issues with voters without actually enacting new laws. The justices left some questions unanswered as to how far the Legislature can go in using such measures in the future.”

The lopsided majority “found that the Legislature has the clear power to seek voter input if considering ways to back a federal constitutional amendment,” the Mercury News continued. “However, the justices sent mixed signals on whether the ruling gives the Legislature blanket authority to use advisory measures to glean voter attitudes on other issues.”

Politically speaking, the decision made a strange fit within California’s prevailing partisan lines. Typically, Republicans incline toward supporting greater independence in the way states shape their policies, while Democrats often prefer that so-called laws of the land uniformly and unambiguously prevail across the country.

Liberals divided

But the court opened itself up to criticism even from anti-Citizens United analysts by requiring state lawmakers to reintroduce legislation that would replace the original ballot measure in question, last election season’s Proposition 49. “The suggested amendment would have allowed for the full regulation or limitation of campaign contributions and spending for the purpose of ensuring that all citizens, regardless of wealth, may express their views to one another and to make clear that the rights protected by the United States Constitution are the rights of natural persons only,” according to Ballotpedia.

Michele Sutter, co-founder of the organization that originally sponsored the bill that became Prop. 49, took to the Sacramento Bee to express her disapproval of the hurdles set up by the court. “In a striking reversal, the state court concluded that Prop. 49 was wrongfully removed from the ballot. Unfortunately, the court’s muddleheaded meddling has left California voters, who were wronged in 2014, disenfranchised again in 2016,” she opined. “Instead of ordering Prop. 49 directly to the November ballot, the court suggests that the Legislature can pass a new bill to do so.”

Last time around, Gov. Jerry Brown opposed the inclusion of Prop. 49 on the ballot, despite his longstanding opposition to the more corporate-friendly wing of his own party.  “We should not make it a habit to clutter our ballots with nonbinding measures, as citizens rightfully assume that their votes are meant to have legal effect,” he said, as the Los Angeles Times noted in its editorial. “The problem with Proposition 49 was that it was a purely advisory referendum that would essentially have turned the polling place into a Gallup Poll, as if California voters need to further crowd a ballot already stuffed full of complicated initiatives and referendums,” complained the board.

But other liberals rallied to the court in the name of the bigger legislative picture. “This is good news for the fight for reform in California and nationally, as it provides legal justification and support for the use of advisory initiatives and referendums to build popular support for this necessary amendment — and to put pressure on lawmakers to act,” The Nation suggested. “With Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley talking up the idea of an amendment, along with a majority of Democrats in Congress and a growing number of enlightened Republicans, there is momentum for reform.”

A measure backed by the California Teachers Association would extend Prop. 30’s higher tax rates on the wealthiest Californians until 2030, with an estimated $7.5 billion each year going to public schools and community colleges.

 

Another measure, this one by the California Hospital Association and the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, makes those higher tax rates permanent and sends half the annual estimated $10 billion to public schools, colleges and universities, 40 percent to Medi-Cal for low-income health care and 10 percent for early childhood development programs. It also imposes a new, higher tax rate on those who make more than $1 million annually. …

 

[Negotiators] for the teachers group and the hospital association have been talking about a third option, which would extend Prop. 30’s higher tax rates and split the money between schools and health programs. That measure is awaiting approval from the state Attorney General’s Office, and a decision about whether to aim that initiative for the ballot won’t be made until later this month. …

 

“We’d prefer one measure, especially on a crowded ballot,” said Gale Kaufman, a political consultant working on the teachers’ measure. “My instincts say less is better always, but it’s difficult to have any hard and fast rules.”

The focus isn’t just on income tax ballot measures, though they have gotten the most early attention. The Chronicle notes that the Making Poverty History initiative “would add a surcharge to the tax bill for land and buildings with an assessed value of $3 million or more. The $6 billion raised annually would go toward programs to reduce poverty in the state, including prenatal services, expanded child care, tax credits and job training grants.”

Steyer follows Schwarzenegger strategy

Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist who is exploring a 2018 run for governor, also is looking to make a political name for himself with a ballot measure, as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in 2002 with Proposition 49, a successful ballot measure funding after-school programs, a year before the recall election that ousted Gov. Gray Davis.

Steyer is behind the Save Lives California campaign, which would use a $2-a-pack tax on cigarettes to shore up state Medi-Cal funding and to pay for health-promotion and anti-smoking programs.

A previous ballot measure that successfully raised cigarette taxes was also sponsored by a non-politician believed to be interested in running for governor. Championed by Hollywood producer-director-actor Rob Reiner, Proposition 10 added a 50-cent levy on a pack of cigarettes, with proceeds used mostly to fund early childhood education programs.

But Reiner, unlike Schwarzenegger, never ran for state office.

On the Zocalo Public Square website, Pepperdine academic Pete Peterson takes a look at how this sort of thinking could help California — at least if its citizens were able to receive more sophisticated information about how their local governments were performing:

“For Californians, Detroit was not our first warning about the costs of limited and self-interested civic participation. We have our own examples — like the bankrupt cities of San Bernardino, Stockton, and Vallejo, and the municipal corruption of Bell. …

“The use of perfor- mance 'dashboards' — online platforms that visualize spend- ing and program performance — by forward-thinking municipal and state governments shows how we can much better evaluate and communicate government programs. The challenge comes …  finding the courage to shut down programs that simply don’t work. …

“The field of data visualization has made presenting complex information — from budgets to program performance — almost easy. Take a look at Salinas, California’s 'Open Budget Platform' (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to this company) or Michigan’s 'Mi Dashboard,' and you’ll see the days of budgets in three-ring binders are numbered.”

The second piece — “Can Government Play Moneyball?” in The Atlantic by former budget officials for both the Bush 43 and Obama administrations — is maddening in that it shows efforts to actually evaluate federal programs for their efficacy date back to the early years of the Clinton administration.  The results, alas, are rarely followed through on.

Coming to the rescue of a counterproductive program

The authors are ultimately upbeat that such evaluations will someday help hack down federal spending. But they also provide an amusing/depressing anecdote about the circumstances that led Congress to keep going with a failed program, starring then-future Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The federal government’s long-running after-school program, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, has shown no effect on academic outcomes on elementary-school students—and significant increases in school suspensions and incidents requiring other forms of discipline. The Bush administration attempted to reduce funding for the program. But following impassioned testimony on behalf of the program by Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a potential candidate for governor of California, congressional appropriators agreed to restore all funding. Today the program still gets more than $1 billion a year in federal funds.”

It's been 11 years since Arnold was an ardent campaigner for afterschool programs, including his own California initiative. But the federal version doesn't work, and yet we've poured more than $10 billion into it over the last decade — because Arnold got in the way when reasonable and rational people tried to pull the plug.

One more example that Arnold only pretended to be a Milton Friedman acolyte all those years before he got into politics and ended all doubts.