If California were a country

If California were a country, the Democrats would be said to have scored a huge victory yesterday.

First, Jerry Brown was elected governor. Second, Barbara Boxer was reelected.

Third and probably at least as important as the other two, was that Proposition 25 passed. Prop 25 removed the requirement of a 2/3 majority to pass a budget and returned the rule to simultaneous majorities in both houses of the state legislature combined with the governor's signature. This means that the sizable Democratic majorities in the state legislature will be able (finally) to pass the kind of budget that the majority of Californian's clearly want. Second, it means that governor of California is no longer a weak figure head. Under the old system, the same vote was needed to pass a budget as was needed to override a veto. This meant that the governor was largely shut out of the legislative process especially if the governor in question was unable to exert any influence among the blocking minority. Governor elect Brown (and his successors) will be much more powerful than either Schwarzenegger or Gray Davis. This is a good thing in my opinion.

This new budget arrangement means that when one party controls both houses and the governorship, they will actually be able to govern. This also means that even when there is divided government (different parties controlling different houses of the legislature or the governorship), that the governor become a much more important player than had been the case before. What's more, in the event that one has one party controlling both houses of the legislature and a different party controlling the governorship, the new rules makes obstructionism a much more high profile strategy.

Consider the situation that California faced during Schwarzenegger's years in Sacramento. The Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature but not by the required 2/3. Schwarzenegger might have been inclined to compromise with them but he was not the reason compromise was so difficult. Rather it was radical conservative legislators, from districts far from typical for California, that held things up. The result was a deadlock that was imposed (repeatedly) by one party on the entire state under circumstances where the political costs one might expect to result from such behavior were either shared out or not imposed at all because of the narrowness of the constituencies of the legislators in question. If California had had the new budget rule in place back then however, the real fight over the budget would have been between Governor Schwarzenegger and the Democratic legislative majority. If Schwarzenegger had wanted to be as intransigent as the Republicans in the legislature had been, he would have had to do so under a spot light. He would have had to take center stage in the state and make his case for a veto. That's much harder to do because he would have had to appeal to a much broader cross section of the electorate than any one legislator would. And, as governor, he would get a lot more media attention for what ever actions he chose to take. I suspect that it would have made a Republican governor like Schwarzenegger much more reluctant to adopt the kind of scorched Earth approach so favored by Republicans in the California state legislature.

This won't solve California's problems. But it does at least make a solution possible. So let the healing begin California!