By Chris Reed

The persistence with which George Skelton writes silly, slanted stuff is hard to exaggerate. He only occasionally tells his L.A. Times readers that unions run Sacramento. He is a constant advocate of the Sacramento establishment’s mantra that the main thing wrong with California is our low tax structure, even if our taxes aren’t low. Now Skelton is at it again, depicting 34 percent of voters as a “small minority” in his column calling for “adjustments” to Prop. 13 and an end to its requirement that many taxes can only be approved by a two-thirds vote.

Property taxes are the only taxes in California that aren’t high by national standards. Our income tax is now the nation’s highest and our gas and sales taxes are very near the top, and our corporate taxes are the highest in the West. Meanwhile, our unemployment is the second highest in the state and has been over 10 percent for more than three years, and we’re about to saddle industry (and consumers) with the highest energy costs in the nation.

And George Skelton surveys this picture and concludes our biggest problem is … the fact that one category of taxation in California isn’t among the highest in the nation.

But, hey, he’s got his own grand tradition to uphold. Last December, George wrote a column trashing Jerry Brown for saying in 2010 while running for gov that he wouldn’t back “new taxes unless the people vote for them.”

“This was an unfortunate promise Brown made when running for governor in a too-clever-by-half effort to undercut opponent Meg Whitman’s false characterization of him as a liberal tax and spender. …

“It’s hard to find anyone around the Capitol outside the governor’s office who doesn’t think the promise was wrongheaded.”

Inside George’s bubble, everyone wants higher taxes, you see. Those who resist? They’re a “small minority,” if they exist at all.

George Skelton: Still delivering the big laughs after 50 years on the job!

By Wayne Lusvardi

Most people are familiar with the term “fusion” as a type of restaurant that combines Hawaiian, Asian and American types of food. But with the recent top-two primary election on June 5, California is gradually moving to a system of electoral fusion.  It could be called a de facto Fusion Party, where the party exercises power without being officially established.

Political fusion is an arrangement where two parties on a ballot list the same candidate.  Fusion has been outlawed in many states.

A version of fusionism emerging in California is this under the new Top Two system, which voters approved under Proposition 14 back in 2010. The majority party floods election ballots with at least two of its candidates. Then it only allows the minority party to influence election results by endorsing one of the major party’s candidates.  Another name for political fusion is cross-endorsement.

Voters Fooled Again

Prop. 10 and Top Two were promoted as advancing moderate candidates, supposedly ending the ultra-partisan bickering that has characterized state politics in recent years.

But few moderate candidates advanced to the runoff election on June 5.  In State Assembly District 41 in Pasadena, for example, pro-business Democratic candidate Victoria Rusnak could not overcome union-backed city councilman Chris Holden, a Democrat, or Tea Party candidate Donna Lowe, a Republican, despite Rusnak putting $200,000 of her own money into the campaign.

And in one case, a Republican challenger for State Assembly District 27 in Ventura with more than 50 percent of the vote, Todd Zink, has been forced into a runoff election with  Democrat environmental extremist Fran Pavley, a termed-out state senator. She was a major backer of Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

California primary elections are becoming like the Pacific 12 Football Conference playoffs.  If a team wins the Southern Division and beat the Northern Division champion during the regular season, they still may have to beat them a second time in a playoff game to determine the conference champion.

How the Fusion Party Emerged from Political Extortion

The top-two primary was touted as a way to reduce political extremism.  What it’s turning into is as a way to compel Republicans to vote for either of two Democrats.

Prop. 14 eliminated third parties, banned write-in candidates, created false competitive districts and erased Republicans from general elections. Voters should have recognized something was rotten when Prop. 14 was oddly supported by the California Chamber of Commerce Political Advisory Committee and opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the California League of Conservation voters.  Normally, voters would think this would have been the other way around.

No Checks on Power — No Democracy

So what California will eventually end up with from a Top Two Primary system and redistricting is no more check on power by the opposing Republican Party. There will be no check on the plundering of the middle class and small business by a trifecta of government, unions and big corporations.   As Steven Greenhut perceptively explains in his article, “California Ushers in a New Era of Bipartisan Plunder,” redistricting and the Top-Two Primary will lead to:

(1) Democrats gaining a solid two-thirds majority is both houses of the Legislature, where they will have the power to tax at will;
(2) Control of the power of taxation will be by unions ,not moderate legislators;
(3) Corporate support for higher taxation for large infrastructure projects such as the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the Peripheral Canal.

The few will be enriched mainly at the expense of private middle-class taxpayers.  Government and schools may be again “fully funded,” pensions may not be reformed or could eventually be restored to lucrative levels and big engineering companies would reap windfalls.   But public electric utilities, large private industries, small businesses and homeowners will get clobbered from higher taxation, mandated higher green power rates and California’s Cap and Trade emissions tax.   The overall economy will get worse, while those politically connected will do better.

Usurping Democracy

It is never easy to overthrow a democracy; and harder to replace it even with a fusion form of government sold to the public as a way to reduce political dysfunction.  Social institutions possess a massive amount of bureaucratic inertia that takes years to change. Election reform has been bouncing around since the 1990’s.

In a democratic republic, the three branches of the state — legislative, executive and judicial — are separate.  They may even at times work at cross-purposes to balance each other.  In a politically fused form of government, these organs must be deprived of their relative independence and reorganized with a clear chain of command directly to the fusers in power.

Californian Ambrose Bierce once wrote his “The Devil’s Dictionary”:

“GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.”

The culture of these organizations must also be reformed and reorganized so the primary loyalty is to the new political fusion or coalition hiding behind the Legislature than to those in the institutions they serve.  Progressive era organizational independence and professionalism must be subtly supplanted. Fusion leaders do not want to be loved or feared, but paid.

If coercing existing bureaucracies fails, then parallel institutions must gradually take over the functions of the state.  Hence we have the Delta Stewardship Council and a number of entities created by ballot initiatives to benefit government bond entrepreneurs: the Institute for Regenerative Medicine for stem cell research, the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the independent state lottery system.  Who knows how many more parallel unaccountable entities are to come with new redistricting and Top Two primaries?

A democratic republic is being undermined not only by a coalition of unions with big banks, big engineering corporations and bond entrepreneurs but also by duped voters. “The people, when deceived by a false notion of the good, often desires its own ruin,” wrote Machiavelli 500 years ago.

Voters must either be disenfranchised or their votes channeled for candidates chosen by power elites. Democracy means “the rule of the people.”  Hence, it follows that it is the people who have the most to lose.

In a hybrid fusion form of government, candidates do not need as much a broad base of popularity to win office.  Voting must subtly shift from “consent of the taxed and the governed” to a “consensus” of the beneficiaries.

Machiavelli again: “All laws made in favor of freedom arise from the disunion — or de-fusing — between the People and the Elites.”

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — God help California from its current crop of wealthy “moderates” who believe that the only thing that will save our state is a dose of higher taxes. They continue to embrace electoral rule changes that ultimately will undermine the Republicans’ supposedly hard line against tax hikes.

June 5 saw was the first election to use the “top two” primary system, a form of open primary designed specifically to elect more candidates who resemble former state Sen. Abel Maldonado and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the two politicians most responsible for its implementation. These are two of the least-effective and least-principled Republicans to attain higher office in recent years, so let this serve as a warning about what is to come.

The election also took place utilizing new electoral districts drawn according to a supposedly apolitical redistricting system.

After the smoke cleared, we find these results: “Top two” has obliterated minor parties and assured that the ideas they could bring to the general election will not get a fair hearing. In many legislative races, the general election will pit two members of the same party against each other, which is part of the system’s design. Top two was supposed to promote greater choice, but voters will have fewer choices.

Top two is supposed to reduce the influence of big money, but record amounts were spent in the primary cycle. This system will only increase the power of moneyed interests. Now winning candidates will need to run in two open, general elections, rather than in a narrow primary, then in a general election for what was typically a safe seat. That takes a lot more money. Who do you think will provide it?

Redistricting was supposed to take the politics out of politics, but media reports showed that Republicans improperly vetted the redistricting commission members, allowing agenda-driven lefties on the panel.

Between the two “reforms,” it’s clear what will happen after November. Democrats are likely to gain a rock-solid two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature, where they then can raise taxes at will.

Another “moderate” reform has also gone into effect — the elimination of the two-thirds vote requirement to pass state budgets. We can already see what has happened as a result of that change. In this cycle, Republicans don’t have any say in the process, because Democrats, who already have sizable majorities in both houses, no longer need GOP votes to pass their budgets.

I’m not sure I see anything moderate about giving one party and its most extreme elements unalloyed power to pass budgets.

Constitutional convention

Fortunately, these political reformers were unsuccessful in creating a state constitutional convention that would have enabled the liberals who dominate our political process to cast aside many of the taxpayer protections in the California Constitution. But some of them are eager to see the initiative, recall and referendum process hobbled, so as to make average folks more dependent than ever on the Legislature.

These good-government types argue that Democrats and Republicans are too partisan (true), that liberals are too focused on insanity such as banning foie gras and imposing regulations on tanning salons (also true), and that conservatives are too focused on social issues such as gay marriage (yet again, true). But their solutions miss the mark by more than a country mile.

Broken system

Everyone knows the political system in our state Capitol is broken, but the moderates’ naïveté and failure to consider the law of unintended consequences is infuriating.

The problem isn’t that political parties fight with each other. The problem is that one party, in particular, is in control of the Legislature and statewide constitutional offices, and that this party is controlled by the public-sector unions. Note how infrequently these moderate reformers point to the problem of union dominance.

In a typical newspaper editorial in favor of the 2010 ballot measure that created the top-two primary system, the Marin Independent Journal opined: “Proposition 14 could help bring cooperation and collaborative problem solving back to Sacramento.” As silly as partisan displays can be, I much prefer a world of political debate, where two parties hold each other accountable, rather than a world where few of the political actors have any governing principles and instead work together in a cooperative way to divvy up the spoils provided by taxpayers. The idea that Sacramento would be swept up in a bipartisan spirit of reform is too funny for words.

The ostensible goal of these reforms sounds sincere, but I suspect that most of their advocates have a darker agenda. They know the proposals will help Democrats pick up either enough seats or install enough wobbly Republicans to raise taxes. Once that big battle over taxes is over, there will no longer be a stumbling block to the infrastructure-spending and other programs these business interests support.

The joke will be on them, of course. They envision a world where they are in the back rooms, diverting tax loot toward the infrastructure projects they desperately want. But instead the unions will control those back rooms, just as they do now. These businesses — the ones who sell the rope to the hangman — will soon find their necks in a tightening noose. Sure, they will get their occasional privileges, but the business climate around them will continue to decline.

Ultimately, there will be fewer principled legislators to stand up against tax hikes and regulations just on the grounds that they are wrong. Fewer legislators will focus on creating a better climate for all businesses and not just the favored few. Fewer legislators will call for measures to reform government and stretch tax dollars rather than finding more revenue.

I prefer a battle that at least occasionally revolves around an idea rather than an era of bipartisanship where both parties quietly plunder the rest of us.

By DAVE ROBERTS

The November elections were disastrous for California Republicans. They lost all nine statewide races, lost ground in the state Assembly and failed to gain a seat in Congress, despite California having 12 percent of the House seats and a nationwide tide that saw the GOP gain a net 63 seats. But it may have been slightly less disastrous had the electoral rules now in effect been in place last year, according to David Harmer, who narrowly lost to Democratic Congressman Jerry McNerney in the 11th Congressional District.

“Had Proposition 14 been in effect last year, [American Independent Party candidate David] Christensen could not have appeared on the general-election ballot, and I likely would have won,” Harmer told supporters via e-mail last week. “Unfortunately, Prop. 14 didn’t take effect until this year. But for future elections, the Prop. 14 system, operating in districts drawn by the new independent commission instead of incumbent officeholders, will give voters a clean, up-or-down choice between status-quo incumbents and challengers like me.”

Two-term incumbent McNerney beat Harmer by 48-to-47 percent — a mere 2,638 votes out of more than 240,000 votes cast. Christensen took the other 5 percent. Had Christensen been eliminated from the general election, it’s likely that most of his 12,439 votes would have gone to Harmer. The American Independent Party platform of God, Constitutional fundamentalism, anti-liberalism, pro-family, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-Second Amendment and securing the borders is pretty much in lockstep with Harmer’s views.

Amazingly, Christensen was able to capture so many votes despite not running a campaign.

“Christensen was never a serious candidate,” Harmer told his supporters. “He raised no money, assembled no organization, gave no interviews, and showed up for no forums or debates, save one in his hometown — where he responded to predictable questions by confessing his perplexity. He hadn’t the remotest prospect of winning, or even influencing public opinion. The only effect of his candidacy was to facilitate the re-election of an incumbent whose views were diametrically opposed to his own.

“California voters approved Proposition 14 last June precisely to prevent candidates like Christensen from muddying the general-election waters. Under Prop. 14, all candidates from all parties appear on the same primary ballot, and only the top two vote-getters (regardless of party) proceed to the runoff. It’s an eminently sensible system. Naturally, all the state’s political parties opposed it.”

The maxim of politics making strange bedfellows was indeed in effect with Prop. 14’s opponents. When is the last time the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Green Party, Peace & Freedom Party, American Independent Party and the Libertarian Party agreed on anything? Ralph Nader joined Jon Fleischman (of the Flash Report) and Meg Whitman in opposing it. Republican Congressman Jeff Denham locked arms with public employee unions to fund the anti-Prop. 14 campaign. Supporting Prop. 14 were then-Gov. Schwarzenegger, the California Chamber of Commerce and most of the state’s newspaper editorials.

In two special elections held in February, the winner gained a majority of votes, avoiding a need for a general election runoff. Republican Sharon Runner won 65 percent of the vote in a two-person race against a Democrat to gain the 17th Senate District seat vacated by her husband George when he won election to the State Board of Equalization in November. In the 28th Senate District, Democrat Ted Lieu won 56 percent of the vote, beating out a Democrat, four Republicans and two candidates who declined to state a party affiliation.

Tuesday’s 4th Assembly Race

The next test of the new electoral system took place Tuesday when one Democrat vied against seven Republicans to represent the 4th Assembly District. In the new post-Prop. 14 world there was the possibility that two Republicans would face off in the May 3 general election in a district with 45 percent Republican registration, 31 percent Democrat and 19 percent declining to state. But the top two Republicans split most of the GOP votes, and the Democrat, retired fire chief Dennis Campanale, finished first with 32 percent. He will face Beth Gaines, wife of Ted Gaines, who vacated the seat when he won a special election to represent the 1st Senatorial District.

One of the main arguments both for and against Prop. 14 is that it will lead to a watering down of ideological differences between the parties. Fleischman argued in an anti-Prop. 14 video posted on YouTube last year that we’re likely to get a lot more Abel Maldonados in the state legislature. I asked Fleischman to comment on Harmer’s contention that Prop. 14 would have sent him to Congress last November.

“Obviously, he lost a close election, and that’s frustrating,” said Fleischman. “Prop. 14 is a bad idea. There’s an American tradition that if you run for office and are the nominee for a political party you should be on the ballot. Most importantly, the people wrote Prop. 14 to reduce the role of political parties and elect more people to office who are in the mushy middle. If a political party has a majority, they should be able to set the agenda. David Harmer, as a conservative Republican, would have been extremely disadvantaged in the first election under an open primary system. Prop. 14 is intended to keep people like David Harmer out of office.”

Ironically, Markham Robinson, the California American Independent Party executive committee chairman, agrees with Harmer and welcomes the new electoral rules.

“Number one, numerically he’s indeed correct,” Robinson told me. “He probably wouldn’t have been facing Mr. Christensen because of the greater barriers that Prop. 14 would have imposed. It’s placed a greater barrier in the way of small-scale candidates. Which isn’t much loss given that none of these small candidates are serious. You have to be able to be persuasive enough or popular enough to have a realistic chance of being elected. Some people lament the lack of access of the really small fry. What this will do for the AIP is greatly decrease the number of its candidates, but also make the candidates that do emerge much more realistic ones. The electoral system is vastly changed.”

Robinson’s other takeaway from the 11th Congressional District race is the remarkable showing by Christensen, indicating a dissatisfaction with the major party choices.

“Five percent is a very high percentage for somebody with no name recognition,” he said. “It’s because people didn’t like the Republicans and Democrats. With the Democrats it’s a quick death and the Republicans it’s a slow death. Voters said, ‘I don’t choose death and would rather take a long shot — neither of the two is minimally acceptable.’ This is a very radical and extreme conclusion. Now at least in the primary, even though the barrier is high, we have a chance if we have quality candidates. The two parties will face greater competition if third parties can field people with modest resources and get name recognition – instead of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.”

California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring and Vice Chairman Tom Del Becarro did not respond to requests to comment for this article.