Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Contract With California

May 28, 2004

Arnold Schwarzenegger has proven about as good a Governor of California as any conservative could expect. He kept his promise to repeal the car tax, he has taken a long hard look at waste in California government, and most critically, he has kept his word.

Polls show that Governor Schwarzenegger is enormously popular and that the democrat-controlled legislature is enormously unpopular. Now is the time for him to push some profoundly serious structural reforms in California government, and by doing so demonstrate that these can be adopted by any other state or by the federal government.

California allows amendment of the state constitution by vote of the people and the internet along with the great skill and resources of Governor Schwarzenegger allow him to collect the necessary signatures to get this amendments on the ballot quickly. Rather than ask the legislature to enact these reforms, Schwarzenegger should take these to the people himself.

Time frames are very short to get these measures on the ballot by November, but popular issues which the California Secretary of State, a Democrat, keeps off the ballot in November could actually help fuel voter anger. Schwarzenegger could also call on the leaders of the Democrat Party to urge that the measures be on the ballot, and if they refuse, blame them.

What should be proposed? The measures should be ones that have not only the reality of common sense but also are easy to understand and not overtly controversial. These measures should not be directed against a particular class of Californians, but rather directed against politics as usual.

How many measures? Why not ten? That would be easy to remember and simple to construct. This "Contract With California" could be like the "Contract With America" - a specific platform intended to align the two political parties. Here are my ten suggestions.

Proposal One: Provide that if the budget is not constitutionally enacted within thirty days of the end of the state fiscal year, then each department of state government is authorized and appropriated exactly the same amount it received in the year before. This would give deficit hawks an enormous edge in state government and "exactly the same amount" would be hard to sell to any swing voters as a "cut in spending."

Proposal Two: Allow the Governor to impound any funds not needed by an agency and to apply those funds for the reduction of the state debt. Why spend money that the chief executive thinks is a waste? This would both encourage agencies to be efficient and help reduce the huge burden of debt more quickly.

Proposal Three: Merge both houses of the legislature into a single body. An alternative, which would probably produce too much heat, would be to simply abolish the California State Senate. The objective is the remove the shell game which bicameral legislatures allow to be played with the voters. Jesse Ventura had few good ideas, but one was to adopt a unicameral legislature and end the murkiness of conference committees.
Proposal Four: Term limit all judges. Provide that no judge may serve more than eight years on the bench. Almost everyone now sees how judges abuse their authority, particularly when they feel like they will be on the bench for life. Allow a lifetime of only eight years to judges in any state or local court in California and watch judges act more responsibly.

Proposal Five: Abolish all state and local taxes and hardwire into the state constitution the four taxes allowed - income, excise, property and inheritance/gift - as well as the rates of taxation. Provide five modestly progressive tax rats for income taxes and provide the other three taxes are flat.

Proposal Six: Share this tax revenue with local governments on a set per capita basis. Amendment Five would abolish all other state and local taxes and Amendment Six would provide that these local governments would get exactly what they received in revenue the prior year (or perhaps, averaged over the past three prior years, to account for fluctuations.)

Proposal Seven: Choose presidential electors by congressional district, with two electors also chosen at large. One eighth of Americans are Californians and yet their votes do not matter because California has become reflexively Democrat. This is highly unusual. Historically huge electoral states like New York and Pennsylvania in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have been swing states.

Proposal Eight: Prohibit lawyers from being elected or appointed to any office of trust or honor. Lawyers are officers of the court. Having men who practice law draft laws creates an inherent conflict of interest. Except for certain officers, like prosecuting attorneys and counsel for state government, there is no reason why people who make their living from the practice of law should be eligible to make those laws.

Proposal Nine: Make secondary state officers appointive. The theory behind having a lot of state officers elected is to provide a check and balance upon the power of the Governor. Gray Davis should have been the best example of how that worked. In fact, those Democrats who held secondary statewide offices were all over the map, some opposing recall, others not. They served to hide his failures, not ameliorate the failures.

Proposal Ten: Create a commission to review all state and local government in California and to propose to the people (i.e. have the explicit power to propose to the people) other reforms for consideration in the November 2005 election.

Would these pass? Probably, although the language could be tweaked, like with the Contract With America, to insure that opponents began with a distinct disadvantage. What would California Democrats do? Opposing the reforms would make them more clearly the problem and endorsing the reforms would be betraying the closet constituencies that support them.

More to the point, what would John Kerry do if this were on the ballot in November? The Governor, of course, would campaign actively for it. The Republican National Committee could also endorse it. President Bush could call it "the sort of experiment in good government for which our federal system was created" and "this will jump-start the economy of California, and that will create much more prosperity for America."

It could easily swing the presidential election and, more than that, begin precisely the sort of peaceful revolution which our nation has so long and so desperately needed. Americans want serious, clear and sure reforms. The Contract With California is just what America, and California, wants and needs.

Bruce Walker