By Edward Ring
Friday, October 11, 2024
Every two years, in addition to electing their state
and local officials, Californians participate in so-called citizen democracy, a
process by which they approve or reject legislation in the form of ballot
initiatives. This election season is no exception, except for the fact that
what’s on the ballot, as well as what was removed from it, says a lot about who
really runs the state.
The run-up to California’s November 2024 election is a
battle between, on the one hand, grassroots activists and businesses who are
desperate to stop the onslaught of new taxes and, on the other hand,
public-sector unions and their kept politicians for whom there can never be
enough tax revenue. The outcome could redefine California politics for decades.
What precipitated this battle was activists’ and industry groups’ surprising
success in qualifying a citizens’ initiative for the ballot, the Taxpayer Protection
and Government Accountability Act.
This initiative had game-changing potential on par with
the legendary 1978 Jarvis-Gann initiative, or Proposition 13, which itself was the result of a taxpayer
revolt in California triggered by voters’ perception of out-of-control
increases to their property taxes. Approved by an overwhelming 65 percent of
voters, Proposition 13 modified the state constitution to limit property-tax
increases to 2 percent per year. Two other provisions in Proposition 13 were
equally transformative. The first required a two-thirds vote of the state
legislature to increase non-property taxes. The second required local
governments to refer new tax proposals to the ballot with two-thirds voter
approval required for passage. These severely restricted state and local
elected officials’ ability to raise taxes, but, over the years, they’ve been
slowly undermined by subsequent initiatives, legislation, and court rulings.
The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act of 2024
aimed to close the loopholes and restore the original provisions of Proposition
13.
In response, Governor Gavin Newsom filed a case with the
California Supreme Court, arguing that the Taxpayer Protection Act would “hamper
state and local government’s ability to pay for key services provided to
taxpayers, from trash collection to public safety.” The court, six out of seven
members of which were appointed by Democratic governors, agreed with Newsom
and, outrageously, took the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability
Act off the ballot before voters could have a say. If those judges had been
presiding over California’s highest court in 1978, then the only advantage that
Californian taxpayers still enjoy relative to other states — what remains of
Proposition 13 — might have never been allowed on the ballot, either.
In California, the only way to reverse the vote of
citizens in a ballot initiative is to launch a competing initiative that
overturns it. And because the state legislature can place initiatives onto the
state ballot without having to undergo the messy and expensive process of
gathering signatures on a ballot petition, its Democratic supermajority swiftly
came up with two initiatives to counter the Taxpayer Protection and Government
Accountability Act.
One of them seeks to widen a loophole opened in 2000,
when the California Teachers Association qualified a state ballot initiative that lowered to 55 percent the majority required
for voters to approve borrowing for public-school construction projects. With
the typically massive spending the CTA is capable of, its “Yes” campaign conned
53 percent of voters into approving the measure. But why stop there? Now the
state legislature is asking voters to also lower to 55 percent the approval
threshold for “housing projects and public infrastructure.” Needless to
say, “infrastructure” has come to mean almost anything, which means that if
voters approve this measure, almost any new bond proposal will only require a
55 percent majority to pass. It doesn’t take a policy wonk to recognize how
these initiatives carve gaping loopholes into 1978’s Proposition 13.
The other initiative introduced by the state legislature,
however — which thankfully won’t be on the state ballot until November 2026 —
would, if passed by voters, upend Proposition 13 completely. With a tortured
title guaranteed to scare off low-information voters and befuddle all but the
most diligent, the “California Vote Requirements for Initiatives Requiring
Supermajority Votes Amendment” would require “initiated constitutional
amendments proposing increased voter approval requirements for state or local
measures to be approved by the same majority requirements they propose.” If you
think that sounds convoluted, that’s because it is. The state legislature is
attempting to make it impossible to impose, for example, a two-thirds
supermajority requirement on new tax proposals unless two-thirds of
voters approve of such a requirement.
Imagine the dynamics that this measure — which, by the
way, will only require a 50 percent plus one majority to take effect — would
create. Any group opposed to more taxes would have to not only go through the
multimillion-dollar process of funding a signature-gathering campaign to
qualify a ballot initiative (which, to repeat, the state legislature does not
need to do) and ensure support from a majority of voters; it would also have to
ensure that a sufficiently large majority of voters vote yes on the
initiative. If, for example, only 54 percent of voters approved of an
initiative to institute a 55 percent threshold for approving new taxes, the
effort would fail. Who would take that risk? Goodbye to anti-tax ballot
initiatives.
The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability
Act, an initiative led by Californians who wanted to restrain their one-party
government from raising taxes limitlessly, was considered so serious a threat
by that party that its use of a packed California Supreme Court to remove the
initiative from the ballot was not enough. That was just the legal response. On
top of that, the public-sector-union controlled Democratic mega-majority in the
state legislature came up with two counter-initiatives. We expect Democrats to
spend tens of millions to campaign for them.
If California voters approve these initiatives, they may
forget about ever reining in government spending or preventing endless tax
increases. Given an entrenched regime that runs on cronyism, and an eviscerated
initiative process, that would no longer be an option.
And all this from the people who lecture us all about
“protecting our democracy”!
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