Word: californianess
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...that letting me vote on stuff is a bad idea, for much the same reason that giving me a credit card was a bad idea: I love stuff and hate paying for it. And it turns out there are a lot of people just like me. On May 19, California voters knocked down all five of the budget-cutting and tax-raising propositions designed to save the state budget from being $21 billion short. We already had the worst credit rating of any state. Which means that if states were people, California would be Ed McMahon...
Looking to complain to someone about the stupidity of this initiative system, I called former California governor Gray Davis, who got voted out of office through a recall petition. "I'm not for scrapping the initiative process," Davis said, to my shock. "I believe voters generally make good decisions." Even a recall, it seems, can't stop a politician from kissing up to voters. Davis believes that the initiative system simply needs some tinkering and that voters need an attitude adjustment, which will come later this year when we lose our schools, jails and roads and full color...
...initiative mess, the Bay Area Council, a 64-year-old San Francisco--area business lobby, has proposed a new California constitutional convention, an idea backed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, 2010 gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman, Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown and, polls suggest, two-thirds of voters. The 1879 state constitution is the third longest in the world, and it has more than 500 amendments. But to gather this convention, Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman has to put an initiative on the 2010 ballot. "It's ironic, right? We need an initiative," he says, "to get rid of the initiative...
Like an impulsive starlet, California may find it harder to be cast as the nation's trendsetter if she can't decide what the trend should be in the first place. The state's supreme court ruled last year that California's constitutional right to marry extended to same-sex couples. Then in November voters amended the constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Now the court has upheld voters' right to do so. Protesters have promised another referendum next year; fundraising letters from both sides are already in the mail. So was the California ruling...
...possible that the real battle will be in the gray areas, a fight more practical than ideological. As long as the laws are a patchwork, gay couples will face nasty tangles of rules and regulations if they move, separate or remarry. The 18,000 California couples who wed before Proposition 8 was passed remain legally married, but no one really knows the status of gay spouses who have moved to California from elsewhere (Iowa, Connecticut, Maine or Massachusetts, not to mention all of Canada). At least that will be true until the issue reaches a place that even California...