Despite the 2014 adoption of the most significant reforms to the initiative process in recent California history, two former state Supreme Court justices have gone public with criticism over the dominant role of money in direct democracy, suggesting that the process should be made harder and citing concerns about voter overreach.

The biggest 2014 change approved by the Legislature at the behest of the Think Long for California government reform group requires the Legislature to be notified when a ballot measure gets at least one-quarter of necessary signatures. At that point, lawmakers can confer with measure sponsors about qualms they have with their proposals. They can also head off ballot fights by passing legislation addressing the issues cited in ballot measures.

This is what happened in 2016 with a proposed measure raising the state minimum wage was circulated. The Legislature instead produced its own version of the plan, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed.

The second most important change requires the Legislature to hold public hearings on initiatives which qualified for the ballot via signature-gathering. The hearings must be at least 131 days before the election, promoting closer scrutiny of such legislation.

Special interests, money play dominant roles

But in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, former state Chief Justice Ron George said much more needed to be done to improve the initiative process. George said the very groups that direct democracy was supposed to help keep in check – powerful special interests – “have managed to seize control of the initiative process and, in a way, perverted the whole function of it.”

“If you are willing to pay [signature gatherers enough] … I think you can qualify anything for the ballot,” he said. Those signature gathers in many cases “have no idea what the measure involves.”

George, who was chief justice from 1996 to 2011, also said the initiative process made it “far too easy” for the public to change laws – and the ballot measures they enact can only be changed, in most circumstances, by another ballot measure. Voters have approved more than 500 state measures since direct democracy began in 1911. To make the ballot, a citizen initiative must have signatures that total at least 5 percent of the votes cast for governor the previous gubernatorial election. For 2020, the threshold is just more than 623,000 votes. Twelve measures qualified for the November 2018 ballot. Six passed.

Majority uses votes to ‘impose will’ on a minority

In a recent speech in Berkeley, former state Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, who served on the court from 1994 to 2017, raised additional concerns. She depicted voters as being eager to make sweeping changes in state laws in ever-broader areas and said initiatives are “empowering a majority to impose its will on a minority.” She also said voters didn’t appreciate that justices were expected to tweak ballot measures to ensure they stayed within constitutional boundaries and expressed frustration with the criticism she got in 1996 for a decision in which she concluded part of the state’s “three strikes” crime bill went too far in reducing judicial review.

One of the examples of a ballot measure that may go too far that was cited by the Chronicle was a proposed initiative to put a maximum of five years on alimony. In a telephone interview, Steve Clark – the Huntington Beach software engineer who is behind the proposal – said he was “unpleasantly shocked” at the idea his measure dealt with an issue that should be left to the Legislature. But he said that this view of alimony law reflected the “entitlement state” attitudes of many Californians.

By Katy Grimes

While the state of California has been letting thousands of criminals out of prison since 2009 under Gov. Jerry Brown’s realignment law, California lawmakers are simultaneously proposing dozens of new gun control laws. Looked at separately, the two issues don’t appear necessarily connected. But closer scrutiny shows a dangerous correlation meant to undermine the state’s Three Strikes law, while disarming California citizens.

Instead of focusing on the more than 20,000 criminals released the last two years under AB 109, California’s Prison Realignment law, and the subsequent crime wave, the California Legislature has attempted to divert citizens’ attention by taking up dozens of gun control bills.

AB 109 was the prison “diversion” law that dumped thousands of criminals from state prisons onto local jails, many subsequently being released into the general public and committing crimes.

Brown signed AB 109 only two years ago, ostensibly to “stop the costly, ineffective and unsafe ‘revolving door’ of lower-level offenders and parole violators through our state prisons.”

Despite the success of the Three Strikes law, and the substantial immediate decrease in California crime rates after passage, Democrats in the state Legislature are working to undo all of the good which came from the tough-on-crime law.

Study after study has shown that between 6 percent and 10 percent or criminals are responsible for up to 70 percent of all crimes committed.

School shootings

The worst deadly massacre at a school in American history was not the Newtown shootings, or the Columbine shootings. The worst school massacre took place before there was even a television in every home — in Michigan in 1927.

“A school board official, enraged at a tax increase to fund school construction, quietly planted explosives in Bath Township Elementary. Then, the day he was finally ready, he set off an inferno. When crowds rushed in to rescue the children, he drove up his shrapnel-filled car and detonated it, too, killing more people, including himself,” according to Lenore Skenazy, author of the book, “Free-Range Kids,” about how to raise self-reliant kids.

While the media and politicians respond purely emotionally and opportunistically, they have ignored that these incidents are not new, and are certainly not indigenous to America.

Despite media claims that these types of mass killings are on the rise, the facts simply don’t bear this out. Experts who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common or on the rise, the New York Daily News reported.

“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” said criminologist James Allen Fox, of Boston Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

“The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest,” Fox said. “Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer.”

Society moves on, he says, “because of our ability to distance ourselves from the horror of the day, and because people believe that these tragedies are one of the unfortunate prices we pay for our freedoms.”

But the media will not allow people to move on. And politicians have jumped on the opportunity as well.

Three strikes, you’re out of prison!

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the U.S. Department of Justice, during 2011, the 688,384 releases from state and federal prisons exceeded the 668,800 admissions.

Additionally, there were 21,663 fewer sentenced inmates in 2011 than in 2010. Seventy percent of this decrease was due to California’s Public Safety Realignment program, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In 2011, California released 15,493 prisoners, a decline of prison population by 9.4 percent, and the highest in the entire country. The state let 6,213 prisoners out in 2009-10.

The BJS report showed that during the first three quarters of 2011, 98 percent of releases were conditional mandatory releases to parole, compared to 1.5 percent for unconditional releases due to expiration of prison sentences.

But in the fourth quarter, only 46 percent of releases were conditional, while 52 percent were unconditional, meaning they were without post-release stipulations.

Overall, unconditional releases increased by 691 percent from 2010 to 2011, while conditional releases decreased 20 percent. All types of admissions to California state prisons decreased in 2011, with readmissions of parole violators down 22 percent.

However, Brown and state Democrats have ignored that nearly half of these “non-violent offenders” had previously been incarcerated for serious crimes, which is what led to convictions under the Three Strikes Law in the first place. But parole supervision is now based entirely on an inmate’s current conviction, not on cumulative crimes for which he had served prison time in the past.

As the Huffington Post reported on March 20, “Recent shootings in the LA area have police wondering if a new California law is to blame for the outbreak of gun violence.

“LA County jails assumed supervision of thousands of non-serious felons from California in 2011 when the state legislated ‘inmate realignment’ to deal with state prison overcrowding. The realignment left county jails across the state so overcrowded that low-level inmates have been released early to be rehabilitated on the streets as parolees.”

It’s also unclear how crime will be affected by Proposition 36, which voters passed last November. It lessened the Three Strikes Law from the third strike being any kind of felony, to mandating a life sentence only if the third strike is a serious or violent felony. Within a year we should know if crime has gone up.

 California lawmakers want your gun 

There is little doubt the recent mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., is the motivation behind the large number of gun-control measures moving rapidly through the state Legislature.

SJR 1, by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, is a resolution passed by the state Senate which urges the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama to enact a comprehensive gun violence prevention policy, including prohibiting the sale of military-style assault weapons and “high-capacity magazines.” It also encouraged strengthening criminal background checks.

The Senate also recently passed SB 140, by state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, which would allow the Department of Justice to take illegal firearms away from convicted felons, the mentally unstable and parolees. But existing laws already ban guns for such people.

The California Department of Justice has identified 19,784 Californians who illegally own firearms. The new bills would do nothing to help reduce that number. Instead, law-abiding Californians would be prosecuted for defending themselves.

There are bills proposed to drastically tax ammunition, and bills to ban ammunition and gun replacement parts. Said Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, author of AB 48, the bill to ban ammunition and gun parts, “bullets are the very thing making guns deadly.”

AB 760, by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, would charge 5 cents on every round of ammunition sold in California.

The Assembly Public Safety Committee, led by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, voted to kill AB 249 by Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, to repeal the ban on open carry of firearms. AB 249 would have merely restored a right, matching California law to those of 43 other states that allow open carry.

The same committee voted to kill AB 871, by Assemblyman Brian Jones, R-Santee, which would have provided “good cause” to the conditions for the issuance of a concealed carry permit license. Many studies have shown that granting concealed carry permits to law-abiding citizens has reduced crime by making criminals wary of assaulting decent people who might be armed.

Gun control hurts law-abiding citizens

Gun-control laws only impact the gun owners who follow the law. There are no statistics to show reductions in crime when guns and ammunition are restricted. While 12 of California’s elected sheriffs have taken a stand against gun control, the Legislature forges ahead on unnecessary restrictions in an effort to gin up emotion and opposition, while putting criminals back on California streets.

“People should have as much access to a weapon as a criminal does,” said Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore, at the Public Safety hearing.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — For advocates of less-intrusive government, finding the good news in the recent election is like looking on the bright side after your house has been wiped out by a hurricane: You never did like that floor plan, anyway, and this seems like a great opportunity to rethink your lifestyle.

The political storm was particularly fearsome in California. Democrats already are floating trial balloons now that they have gained a legislative supermajority that allows them to pass direct tax increases without GOP support.

But there was some good news, however slim, on the ballot in the long-neglected area of criminal-justice reform. California voters passed, 69 percent to 31 percent, Proposition 36, to reform the state’s notoriously tough “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” sentencing law.

In 1994, California voters passed Prop. 184, which targeted repeat offenders. Under that law, if a person convicted of two serious or violent felonies commits a third “strike,” it would automatically lead to a life term with no possibility of parole for 25 years. It’s debatable how much “three strikes” contributed to falling crime rates, but there is little question that California’s strict version led to rising incarceration costs and high-profile instances of injustice.

Unlike any of the other 23 states that passed three-strikes laws, California imposed the life sentence on offenders whose third conviction was for “any” felony, rather than for a serious or violent one. So we’ve witnessed cases where offenders have received that life term for robbing someone of a piece of pizza, kiting a bad check and other relatively minor crimes.

Costs

The costs of implementing the law are enormous, especially in a state where the union-controlled, crowded and arguably inhumane prison system costs the taxpaying public $47,000 a year to incarcerate each inmate. Studies put the estimated annual savings of Prop. 36’s passage at $70 million to $200 million, which is significant even in spendthrift California.

Under Prop. 36, a criminal receives a life term only if the third strike is violent or serious or if the offender is previously convicted of child molestation, murder or rape. In other cases, if the third strike is not violent or serious, the offender receives a doubled sentence.

The good news is the reform effort sparked little controversy. A number of prominent conservatives spoke out in favor of Prop. 36, including Grover Norquist, the nationally prominent sponsor of the “no new taxes” pledge. He was quoted in the ballot argument: “The Three Strikes Reform Act is tough on crime without being tough on taxpayers. It will put a stop to needlessly wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ hard-earned money, while protecting people from violent crime.”

Norquist also is a member of a group called Right on Crime, which officially endorsed Prop. 36. Its membership — i.e., Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Ed Meese, potential Republican presidential contenders Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich — isn’t flush with people who send contributions to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Right on Crime argues: “Conservatives are known for being tough on crime, but we must also be tough on criminal justice spending. That means demanding more cost-effective approaches that enhance public safety. A clear example is our reliance on prisons, which serve a critical role by incapacitating dangerous offenders and career criminals but are not the solution for every type of offender. And in some instances, they have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders — making them a greater risk to the public than when they entered.”

Discussion

It’s significant that conservatives would jump-start this discussion, which is needed now that Republicans are regrouping and trying to put together a bundle of government-reform issues that might appeal to the nation’s voters.

Despite the general impression that California is a left-wing hothouse, it has long been a law-and-order state where both parties have played cynically on the public’s oftentimes legitimate fears about crime. There’s been little willingness here to do more than build more prisons and throw more money at a system dominated by the prison guards union, which has lobbied against reforms to protect its “business.”

When I came to California in 1998, it was toward the end of the gubernatorial race that pitted Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren against Democratic Lt. Gov. Gray Davis. Both men were engaging in a “tough on crime” arms race that reached the most absurd levels when, as the New York Times reported, Davis “said in a televised debate, on issues of law and order, he considered Singapore — a country that executes drug offenders — ‘a good starting point.'”

Davis won that race, then was recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, despite his long list of failures, did try, unsuccessfully, to take on the guards and buck the orthodoxy of conservatives who found law-and-order their only winning issue outside of holding the line on taxes. Both parties were appealing to voters who, according to a recent San Jose Mercury News analysis, voted only five times since 1912 “to curb the power of the state’s criminal justice system.”

The GOP today has a great opportunity to focus on justice and cost savings given that the California Democratic Party has let its union domination trump any concern about civil liberties, and it has never cared about protecting the public from excessive taxation. Since Davis, the Democrats have refused to be outflanked on the right on public-safety issues. They have a simple approach to criminal justice matters: Give the police unions and prison guards’ unions anything they want.

Perhaps the opportunity simply is born of receding public fear as crime levels drop to historic lows. Whatever the case, with the passage of Prop. 36 and the emergence of Right on Crime, there’s a clear blueprint for Republicans who want to put into practice their oft-stated promises about reforming and limiting government.

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