The Real Story On The Lakoff Initiative

You may have seen me live-tweeting the events last night at SEIU Local 721 in LA, where Professor George Lakoff and the folks behind CA Majority Rule met with around 200 activists, union members, elected officials, legislative candidates, representatives from Speaker Bass' office, and more, to talk about the just-released proposed November 2010 initiative on majority rule. If you read through both the live tweets and Dante Atkins' notes on the meeting, I think you get a picture of a potential split inside the California Democratic Party, one that could have major implications for all elections next year.

It should be noted that CDP Vice-Chair Eric Bauman was there to offer support. He gave a typical stump speech and said very plainly that "the reason you're here tonight is the solution" to the problems that grip the state, problems he laid out very carefully and completely. He was honest in saying that any Democrat who opposes this kind of measure will be told that "vertebra are available for installation... I think the chiropractor's lobby can help us with that." He made clear that we don't have a spending problem, "we have a common sense problem," and he pushed everyone in the room to work toward a real solution.

But Professor Lakoff's speech seemed to capture the dynamic between the grassroots and the establishment much better. Lakoff opened by talking about the origins of the initiative that he filed yesterday:

I got into this last spring when Lonnie Hancock invited me to speak to a group of State Senators. And I said, what's the problem, you're the majority! And they said they don't have any power. And they explained the whole 2/3rds rule, and how the leadership has to work with them because we want to lose as little as possible.

And I asked, why aren't you in every assembly district explaining this problem? It's about schools, healthcare, everything, and there's no answer. I went back and said that there's something really wrong. Its name is democracy [...] Which is more Democratic? Majority rule, or minority rule? You knew the answer from the 3rd grade on. Even Republicans know the answer but they don't like to. We know there will be a blowback if we try to change things, but the hardest blowback is coming from our side. The reason that Loni Hancock invited me was that there was a poll done by a progressive organization, and it asked the wrong question.

This is my business. Studying language and the framing behind language. If someone presented you with the poll question: would you rather have more taxes and higher services, or fewer taxes and less services. Obviously, it went with the latter. And the legislature concluded that they shouldn't put anything about taxes on the 2010 ballot. Why do they think that? Because they think that polls are objective, and that language just floats out there. They're wrong. Language is not neutral. There's a truth here that that language hides. It's the truth that we don't have Democracy in this state. We have minority rule.

In response, because nobody else would do so, Lakoff's initiative reads: "All Legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote." It's tweetable and it's fairly simple to understand. It's framed as a democratic action to return the state to democratic rule. And it appeals very much to those interested in preserving democracy.

Which is the consensus opinion inside the Democratic Party. We know this because, back in July, the state party passed a resolution calling for majority rule for budget and revenue. And it didn't pass with contentious debate - it passed unanimously. One of the very few people to speak out against it was the Party Chair, John Burton. But the rank and file supported it utterly.

It was something of a reversal for Burton, who when he was trying to get the votes of those rank and file supported a majority vote position. Now he's seen some polls and decided to take half a bite out of the apple. Lakoff described his exceedingly short meeting with Burton last night.

Burton wouldn't talk to me for more than a minute. He just said that he saw the polls, and it said 55% on budget and nothing on taxes. How many of you were at the state convention? You voted on a resolution about this. How did that resolution come before you? The resolutions committee. And that was the point. We got the resolutions committee to do it and got a standing ovation. The rank and file Democrats know it's the right thing to do and they have to tell their leaders. So how do you change this? You have to have a poll, but you have to have pressure. The major donors have to call Burton and say, if you want any money from me, you get behind this. And he has to hear that from donor after donor and organization after organization. We have to win in our own party first. I think John Burton is a good person, same with Bass and Steinberg. It's the good people that we have to win over first.

Later, a woman from AFSCME asserted that Willie Pelote was willing to give $1 million dollars to a majority vote campaign until Burton called him and told him to forget it.

You can argue about what the most effective approach is to deal with California's budget dysfunction. We've been doing that all week. You could say that leaders must prepare the ground by tying things Californians want to revenue, and tell the story of Republicans thwarting the popular will. You can say that we need to throw out the Constitution and move straight to a convention. But what becomes incredibly clear is that there is a groundswell of support inside the party for a simple move to restore democracy to the state, and if the establishment in Sacramento rejects that, in particular John Burton, the subsequent outrage will have a major impact on grassroots support for all Democratic candidates next year. There's just no question about this. The grassroots already feels disrespected and abused by the leadership. They got Hillary Crosby into a statewide officer position based on just this kind of frustration. They feel that one of the richest economies in the world is run like a third-world country, and they know that they will never change that when procedural rules force Democrats into a defensive crouch, where they see their role as losing as little as possible. This split will grow and branch out into statewide officer races, legislative races, etc. The grassroots workhorses won't be very inclined to work so hard for a Party that disrespects them and fails to act in their stated interests. Not to mention the fact that everyone knows that, while we wait another Friedman Unit until the electorate figures out the problem on their own, people will suffer from budget cuts, people will go bankrupt, and people will die.

The CA Majority Rule team has a multi-pronged strategy. One, they are raising money for this poll, to try and prove that a properly framed set of questions will elicit the desired results. Two, they will put Speaker's Bureaus together in every district in California with people who can talk about majority rule and restoring democracy, complete with real-world examples of the fruit of the state's dysfunction. Three, they will seek to pass endorsements of the one-line majority rule initiative in every Democratic club and county committee in California. There's an executive board meeting coming up in November where this will probably come to a crescendo, too.

The real story of the Lakoff initiative is a story about rank and file Democrats wanting their leaders to follow their will. You can argue about tactics or strategy or approach, but that's what it boils down to. And the party leadership had better take heed.

The Friedman Unit Strategy For Perpetual Minority Rule

The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday. The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July. There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.

And that's it. There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.

As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.

A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.

Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it's a fool's errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they're gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold — from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority — on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.

But some grass roots liberals say they're frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.

"This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it," said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. "Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster." [...]

But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.

"People are not ready to pass it," said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. "He's got a theory. Good luck to him."

Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton. At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority. But I don't even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget. And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is - revenues - off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.

What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don't want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.

This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy. We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election. Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012. But our Governor's up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too. As a result, nothing proceeds.

And it's worse than that. We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion. It's not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it's that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.

The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It's accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.

We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped. We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs. But this isn't a failure of imagination. It's a general contentment with the status quo.

Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside. The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier). This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento - they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.

An Aggressive Strategy

As the Governor has tried to hijack the budget crisis to serve his own ends of punishing union workers and shredding the social services net, over the last couple days we've seen Democrats fighting back. For example, Dean Florez surgically took apart the Governor's idiotic smear attempt on legislators for doing their job of legislation. Considering that the Governor has never invited all 120 lawmakers into his smoking tent for a pow-wow, I think there's room for multitasking here. But understanding that would involve basic knowledge about how government works, as Florez said:

Assembly bill 606 creates a commission to serve the marketing interests of the blueberry industry. Another bill defines "honey" to mean the natural food product resulting from the harvest of nectar by honey bees, and a third bill adopts regulations establishing definitions and standards for 100-percent pomegranate juice.

"Look, we're pro-condiment, we're pro-fruit, but the focus needs to be on the budget crisis," McLear said.

Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez (D-Fresno) called Governor Schwarzenegger's criticism "childish" and said he is fed up.

"The governor's turned from an action hero into just another politician," Senator Florez said. "He should really, really take a course on fundamental government on how the legislature works."

"The fact that he doesn't understand these things worries me," he added.

Asm. Nancy Skinner held a press event with small business owners, again using the imagery of Arnold Antionette smoking a stogie in his Jacuzzi to contrast with the state's struggles:

Skinner called a news conference at the corner of Solano Avenue and The Alameda in Berkeley, outside the vacant storefront formerly occupied by A Child’s Place. Near her podium was a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger with a cigar in his mouth, with the headline “While the state drowns in IOUs ARNOLD DOESN’T CARE” and featuring a quotation from this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article on the governor’s method of coping with the stress of the budget crisis: “I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight. I’m going to lay back with a stogie.”

Skinner said that’s pretty cheeky talk for a governor who nixed bills that would’ve helped solve the state’s cash crisis, avoided the need for the IOUs now going out and kept the deficit from growing by another several billion dollars. And it’s particularly distasteful, she said, to small businesses that are struggling through this recession even as Schwarzenegger proudly talks about vetoing a plan to collect sales tax from large online retailers doing business through California-based affiliates.

You can debate AB 178, the plan to collect sales tax on affiliate sales (I don't sell enough in affiliate sales to have much skin in the game, but there are decent arguments on both sides), but aligning with small business to attack a supposedly business-friendly Governor has good optics.

For the wonks, the Assembly produced an analysis of the Governor's so-called "reform" agenda, showing that most of it would be completely irrelevant to the current budget year, and all of it uses math that magically eliminates implementation costs but assumes outrageously oversized savings years down the road. These are cuts to social services pretending to be reform. I guess it's a step up from completely eliminating programs like CalWorks, but it's fundamentally dishonest.

Moments after the Governor's press conference yesterday about CalWorks "reform" (fact-checked here by the CBP), welfare advocates held their own press event that made most of the news items:

"I've never liked when people pick on the poor because they haven't got the ability to fight back," said John Burton, the state Democratic Party chairman and former Senate leader known as a fierce advocate for the poor. "It's a Republican syndrome. It isn't tough for Republicans to beat up on poor people. When finances are terrible, they go after the poor and blame the poor. Republicans constantly use that and don't worry about all the benefits government gives to businesses." [...]

Welfare advocates countered that nearly two-thirds of recipients are working or participating in training, and that half are making some kind of income. They also said that the governor's own May revised budget proposal estimated an annual savings of $100 million with that reform.

"He's reinforcing negative stereotypes and scapegoating people for the failure of his own administration," said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association of California. "It's a reflection of a bully mentality, to go after the problems of struggling families when he doesn't get his way. The last thing those families need is to have a powerful figure accuse them of fraud, of not trying."

Furthermore, the CA Democratic Party has collected budget horror stories to highlight the human cost of the crisis. Here's one picked at random:

I am on Social Security Disability and with the amounts allowed to get SSI having been cut, it has also cut my income. Also, my medical coverage is being hit as well as so many of the social programs all of us depend on. Fortunately, I am not homeless yet, but it is a good possibility. I just do not understand how you could make all Californians suffer, especially those of us who are very low income, in favor of giving a huge tax break to oil and tobacco. This is not just or right and I believe that the solution is to sign the compromise bill, and tax the big corporations that are not now paying their fair share! – Christine, Victorville

The structural barriers in the state are so high that I'm not sure any of this can work. One thing is certain, however - this aggressive strategy creates energy in the grassroots, inspires changes to the system and can leverage public opinion far better than desperately seeking some compromise behind closed doors.

A Tale Of Two Polls

Dan Walters is touting a UC Riverside poll on budget issues that interviewed 276 respondents, 63% male, with a 42-38-11 split among Democrats, Republicans and independents. He does this with a straight face.

It barely matters what such a flawed poll shows, but I'll mention it anyway. According to 276 people, 57% support the 2/3 requirement for passing a budget, 24% preferred a simple majority, 6% in between, 4% other (?), and 6% don't know. Given the bad methodology, these numbers mean nothing.

But I'll tell you who has historically taken numbers like these as the gospel's truth and used them to mute themselves about any reform efforts for thirty years. That would be the leaders of the California Democratic Party. And they latch on to any poll numbers showing a view like this as a blunt instrument to kick hippies, not a starting point for the political advocacy and opinion leadership that can and should be done to change perspectives.

Meanwhile, the David Binder memo, with ten times the poll respondents and a clear majority favoring a broad swath of tax increases over spending cuts to deal with the deficit, goes unmentioned by virtually everyone in this state. And in that desert, voters go vainly on a futile search for leadership. They find nothing but shell-shocked politicians.

Uniting The Fight For Accountability

The quotes from Bob Mulholland and John Heaner are very interesting in this story:

John Heaner, one of the author's of the resolution, said that its passage is significant because it means investigations have support not just at the grassroots level but among elected California leaders.

"The state party doesn't act unilaterally on these sorts of things. There are consultations behind the scenes," said Heaner. "At some level there was a go-ahead given."

Heaner noted that the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is a California Democrat and that her daughter Christine Pelosi is an active member of the state party and head of the platform committee. "Yes, it was a grassroots effort but we are united in a way that hasn't come to the surface yet," he said. "When a resolution comes in that may be controversial, we work carefully within the party mechanism." [...]

Impeachment hearings would begin in the House Judiciary Committee, where chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has vowed to look into the role that Bush administration attorneys such as Bybee played in illegally authorizing torture. The state party's action is meant to encourage those hearings and demonstrate that support for investigations is a mainstream Democratic Party position.

"This is a message to them: 'Hey, we're backing you up, Congress, so continue the investigations and the hearings,'" said Mulholland. "I would think an overwhelming number of Democratic voters in California would agree with this."

Be sure to make the calls and emails to push the House Judiciary Committee to open hearings.

ACTION: Tell Congress To Open Impeachment Inquiry Into Jay Bybee

UPDATE: Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post has the full story of the passage of the resolution at the convention.

Thanks again to all of you who signed petitions and made phone calls and helped push the resolution to open a Congressional inquiry into Torture Judge Jay Bybee, which the California Democratic Party adopted at its convention yesterday. I have been told by the authors of the resolution that the pressure from the outside really aided their efforts.

The passage of the resolution was a beginning, not an ending. I view the impeachment of Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit Court as a moral and legal imperative, but also an entryway into the larger fight for justice and accountability for those who authorized and directed torture in our name. I agree with Jerrold Nadler that impeachment should not be seen as a compromise measure, a way to satiate those concerned with accountability. "There can't be a compromise -- you have to follow the law ... If the facts say that some former high-ranking official should be prosecuted, the fact people will get angry should be irrelevant ... If we do not investigate the torture that is clear that it occured, and if the evidence is there prosecute, not only are we disobeying the law, not only are we being immoral, but we are inviting torture of our people in the future."

Bybee's impeachment can start us down the path to restoring the rule of law. And now the largest state Democratic Party in the country has spoken. They have said that the myth about torture being a useful tool to extract actionable intelligence from terror suspects is not only irrelevant when it comes to lawbreaking but also entirely false, according to the CIA's own inspector general. They have said that Judge Bybee's appalling judgment and slavish acceptance of John Yoo's flawed legal reasoning represents a greater evil - the evil of thoughtlessness - and a greater responsibility for the actions committed thanks to his off-handed signature. They have said that Bybee's understanding of his own wrongdoing outweighed by his desire to be a federal judge shocks the conscience, and that far from being rewarded for his obedience to his conservative minders, he should bear responsibility for it, to the fullest extent possible.

So what do we do now? Members of the California Democratic Party include 34 members of Congress, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and six men and women who sit on the House Judiciary Committee, where an impeachment inquiry would be remanded. They need to hear that their party just recommended that they open an immediate Congressional inquiry into Judge Bybee, with all appropriate remedies and punishments available. In fact, the entire House Judiciary Committee needs to hear this. Thanks to my friends at Firedoglake, they will. We have put together a contact list for the entire House Judiciary Committee, and you can, with just a few clicks, compose a letter to any member of that Committee telling them of the CDP's action and demanding immediate action on an inquiry.

House Judiciary Committee
John Conyers, Michigan	Howard Berman, California
Rick Boucher, Virginia	Jerrold Nadler, New York
Robert C. Scott, Virginia	Mel Watt, North Carolina
Zoe Lofgren, California	Sheila Jackson-Lee, Texas
Maxine Waters, California	Bill Delahunt, Massachusetts
Robert Wexler, Florida	Steve Cohen, Tennessee
Hank Johnson, Georgia	Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico
Luis Gutierrez, Illinois	Brad Sherman, California
Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin	Charles Gonzalez, Texas
Anthony Weiner, New York	Adam Schiff, California
Linda Sánchez, California	Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Fl
Dan Maffei, New York	Lamar S. Smith, Texas
Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin	Howard Coble, North Carolina
Elton Gallegly, California	Bob Goodlatte, Virginia
Dan Lungren, California	Darrell Issa, California
Randy Forbes, Virginia	Steve King, Iowa
Trent Franks, Arizona	Louie Gohmert, Texas<
Jim Jordan, Ohio	Ted Poe, Texas
Jason Chaffetz, Utah	Tom Rooney, Florida
Gregg Harper, Mississippi

In addition, you can call your members of Congress and tell them that they must support an immediate inquiry into the actions of Jay Bybee, federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Congressional switchboard at 1-866-220-0044 can connect you to your member of Congress as well. Here are some talking points:

• Jay Bybee signed the August 1, 2002 memo approving certain torture techniques to be used on mentally ill terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.

• The CIA’s Inspector General found that the torture of Abu Zubaydah and others foiled no terror plots and sent intelligence personnel on wild goose chases and false leads around the world. (McClatchy, 4.24.09)

• The California Democratic Party is the largest state party in the country, and they have spoken with one voice to demand hearings on Bybee.

• We are required by the Convention Against Torture to investigate and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those who authorized and committed acts of torture.

• Judge Bybee's presence on the 9th Circuit disgraces the federal bench and saps at our moral authority in the world. Congress has a duty to step in and impeach him.

We now have this resolution as a tool. Let's use it to pry open the Congress and provide the opening of some accountability for these heinous acts committed in our name.

CDP Convention - On The Way

Headed out the door for a nice, leisurely six-hour drive through the Central Valley to Sacramento for another California Democratic Party Convention. Calitics will have full coverage, of course - many of our writers will be on hand, both as delegates and as plain old media. There's a lot to cover, from party elections to endorsements on the May 19 election to the resolution to impeach Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit to the unofficial opening of the 2010 election.

The early pre-convention news is that Antonio Villaraigosa won't be making the trip with me (although there's still room in the car, so you never know). It's a confusing development, considering all the high-profile events other gubernatorial hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown are holding (Jerry's got a kegger at the old Governor's Mansion, while Gavin is part of an outdoor block party featuring Wyclef Jean). But that may be the reason, as Villaraigosa wasn't able to compete.

Villaraigosa’s press office sent out a release announcing: “Mayor Villaraigosa today announced that he will convene emergency weekend meetings with union leaders to tackle the city's budget crisis.

“Talks will focus on ways to close a $530 million budget deficit through shared sacrifice and shared responsibility. The Mayor will begin meetings in City Hall with labor leaders on Friday evening and will continue through the weekend.” [...]

Calbuzz asked Tony V spokesman Sean Clegg if the emergency budget session was "just a lame, bullshit excuse" to skip the convention. “It’s exactly the opposite of that," Clegg said. "The city of Los Angeles and most cities across California are facing an unprecedented economic crisis and jobs come first.”

Clegg said Villaraigosa is putting the needs of his city before his personal political fortunes by trying to pull together an agreement that would require labor unions to give back some hard-earned gains in order to save jobs and services in Los Angeles.

“This is a leadership moment. Antonio Villaraigosa is not going to Twitter while Rome burns,” Clegg said -- a clear shot at the other mayor who would be governor: San Francisco's Gavin Newsom.

At the same time, a Tulchin Research/Acosta|Salazar pre-convention poll (which is three weeks out, but released on convention eve) shows Villaraigosa slipping. The poll had Garamendi in the race at the time.

Tulchin Research/Acosta|Salazar +/- 4.5% (Mar. 31-Apr. 2)
Brown 31%
Newsom 16%
Villaraigosa 12%
Garamendi 11%
O'Connell 6%
Other 4%
Undecided 20%

Obviously, that top-line support is soft, with 1 in 5 undecided. But I'm frankly surprised how quickly this is turning into a two-horse race, which could actually open the door for a progressive movement candidate, if one existed. But alas...

Anyway, those are just a couple of the issues we'll see unfold. Stay with us throughout the weekend.

(I've teed up a few posts while I'm on the ride, but it'll be a light post day until late afternoon)

Only If You Ignore The Law

The LA Times prints the opinion of a few legal minds and decides that it would be impossible to prosecute lawyers for their legal opinions authorizing torture.

First, the lawyers would have to be shown to have deliberately misinterpreted the law against torture.

"It would be a real stretch. As long as they thought they were honestly interpreting the [anti-torture] law, they are not criminal conspirators," said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former prosecutor. "They may be bad lawyers who gave extremely bad advice," he said, but that is not a crime [...]

In this instance, a prosecutor would have to show that Yoo or Bybee intentionally misstated the anti-torture law. "Given the somewhat subjective basis for almost all legal analysis, I don't know how you would ever prove that," said Stanley Brand, a Washington lawyer and onetime counsel to former House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.

"You would have to show they knowingly gave bogus advice," said Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's public integrity unit. "Theoretically, you could do it, but only if you had evidence they knew that's what they were really doing."

Legal experts said they would see the matter differently if the focus was on war crimes and international law.

Except, you know, the focus IS on war crimes and international law, which these torture memo writers expressly disobeyed. Even in the Bradbury memo of 2005, he admits that this country condemns the use of these techniques when employed by other countries.

The United States condemns coercive interrogation techniques and other practices employed by other countries. Certain of the techniques the United States has condemned appear to bear some resemblance to CIA interrogation techniques [...]

The State Department’s inclusion of nudity, water dousing, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation among the conduct it condemns is significant and provides some indication of an executive foreign relations tradition condemning the use of these techniques.

The reason we condemn those acts of torture (and thank you John Boehner for finally calling it that) is because they are illegal, and when practiced by our own leaders we have an obligation to hold those who authorized and directed torture accountable.

many people, such as Scott Horton, have argued that prosecutions of Bush DOJ lawyers who authorized torture find precedent in the Nuremberg prosecutions (as part of the Justice Case) of German lawyers who also declared various war crimes to be legal. International law professor Kevin Jon Heller -- who questioned the applicability of that precedent -- today writes about a separate set of prosecutions by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, as part of The Ministries Case, in which German officials were prosecuted for doing nothing other than stating, when asked, that they had no objection to the deportation of 5,000 Jews from France. Those officials, who were convicted at Nuremberg, did not order the deportation or carry it out; rather, they merely failed, when asked, to object to the policy on the ground that it violated international law. Professor Heller argues that this case provides an almost perfect precedent for holding OLC torture-authorizing officials accountable (emphasis in original):

The parallels between the Foreign Office’s role in the SS deportations and the OLC’s role in the CIA’s torture regime are uncanny. Nothing is lost if we simply substitute "Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury" for "Woermann and von Weizsaecker," "OLC" for "Foreign Office," and "torture" for "deportations."

Indeed, in one critical respect, the case against the authors of the OLC memos is even stronger than the case against von Weizsaecker and Woermann. The latter’s criminal participation in the deportations consisted solely of omissions -- failing to point out that the deportations violated international law. The former’s criminal participation in the CIA’s torture regime, by contrast, consists of both acts and omissions, because Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury not only failed to point out that the torture regime violated international law (and US law, as well), they crafted legal arguments to conceal the illegality of that regime.

Now, you can argue, like McCain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that poor legal advice is not a crime, but you would be at odds with international law and precedent. At the very, very least, kep architects of the torture regime shouldn't still have a job in the US Government, or as a federal judge with a lifetime appointment. But ruling out prosecutions as impractical just rules out the law itself.

I'll throw in a last plug for my petition to have the California Democratic Party pass a resolution to impeach Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. I have 4,420 signatures on the petition already, and I will present them at the Resolutions Committee tomorrow.

Burton Out-One-Lines The One-Liners

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Budget Reform Now group released their first TV ad yesterday, full of buzzwords and bullet points ("Hold the politicians accountable!") and admitting that the package includes a "spending limit," which is certainly further than the Democratic legislative leadership has been willing to go. But as one-line summations of the election goes, you can't get much better than future chair of the CDP John Burton, who took a pass on giving his specific voting choices for May 19, but who uttered this classic quip:

In any case, pressed on the question of whether his lifelong bleeding heart liberalism would allow him to back some of the permanent budget cuts that would result if Prop. 1A is passed, Mr. Almost Chairman responded with a classic Burtonism:

“I think when it’s all over, the ones getting fucked will be the poor people.”

Now, I could give you the charts showing how spending will be forced down and payments to the reserve fund mandated even in bad budget years, or offer the example of TABOR's spending cap in Colorado, which was disastrous. And I could follow you through the contours of this bad public policy and how it does nothing to relieve the structural problems that can get California out of the ditch. But I cannot improve upon that line. I've been critical of Burton in the past, based on the need for forward-thinking strategies at the CDP, but I've never questioned his liberalism. And you have to give him the credit for this, er, bon mot.

Now who will have the guts to put it on a mailer?

Campaign Update: CA-04, CA-32, CA-03, CA-10, CA-Yacht Party

Since it referenced me, let me start by shouting out to fellow Calitician Lucas O'Connor, writing on the front page of MyDD:

Since approximately the morning after election day in November, Dave Dayen has been writing over at Calitics about the dramatic Congressional pick-up opportunities in California that were missed in the Obama wave. Specifically, Obama carried 42 of California's 53 districts (I won't even begin right now to get into the state leg breakdown which is also a debacle), including eight districts held by Republicans in Congress. Well all of a sudden this week, the whole world is waking up to the Dayen gospel.

Attention started building about two weeks ago when the DCCC announced it would target all eight of these Obama-Republican California districts. But an announcement of DCCC targeting hasn't always meant a lot, so to really get going it took a new report from California Target Book finding in part:

Not only is the current statewide Republican registration of 31% a historic low, but for the first time there is not a single congressional, state senate or assembly district that has a majority Republican registration.

Apparently Bob Mulholland sent out a press release waking up to these facts last week. Now, I'm not going to hate on Mulholland for finally getting with the program. But let's make ourselves clear - this was true in 2006 and 2008 as well, and yet the state party failed to capitalize, by their own admission. So it's going to take more than one press release to show a commitment. Republicans have obviously become repellent to the broad majority of Californians, and they're too busy trying to recall each other to notice. It's upsetting that we haven't used this unpopularity in the past two election cycles, and I hope that the CDP can catch up with the curve.

They can start with effective recruitment. John Garamendi, who spoke to Greg Lucas as if he's still a gubernatorial candidate but who by all accounts will be running for Congress, ought to be pushed to run in the 3rd District, where he is the largest landowner and where there is currently no viable candidate to beat Dan Lungren in a district that is trending Democratic, instead of the 10th, where there are multiple viable candidates. Recruitment is an often-unremarked-upon but crucial element to winning elections.

Speaking of which...

• CA-04: This CapAlert piece certainly makes it sound like Charlie Brown might challenge Tom McClintock once again.

At the Jefferson-Jackson dinner at the Blue Goose Fruit Shed in Loomis, Brown and his wife, Jan, were honored as photographs flashed of Brown and supporters during four years of campaigning. The production was accompanied by songs from Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender" to Neil Young's "Long May You Run."

And then Brown stirred huge cheers when he hinted he might have the stamina for one more try for Congress in 2010.

"We'll see what happens over the next few months - and whether you'll have the opportunity to get into any pictures again," Brown said.

In an interview, Brown said he is still mulling his prospects. He said he expects to decide by this fall.

We're big fans of Charlie here at Calitics, and should he run again we'll stand with him. McClintock would have the power of incumbency and a red-leaning district but the rumblings I'm hearing out of there signal that residents and local pols aren't all that enthused by the new Congressman's performance.

• CA-32: The LA Times weighs in with an overview of the 32nd race to replace Labor Secretary Hilda Solis set for May 19. They list Judy Chu and Gil Cedillo as the front-runners (though Emanuel Pleitez is profiled) and suggest that the race is a harbinger of the changing, minority-majority face of Southern California politics. They also mention the Betty Tom Chu controversy, as well as some allegations on the Cedillo side.

Judy Chu supporters suspect that Republican Betty Tom Chu, a Monterey Park councilwoman and a political opponent of Judy Chu, entered the race to confuse voters and harm the chances of her distant relative by marriage. Tom Chu said last week she did not have time to discuss her candidacy, but earlier told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune that she is running because she could not support any of the other candidates and wanted to offer voters an alternative.

Apparently motivated by concerns that the large number of Latino candidates in the race would split the vote in that group and give Judy Chu the edge, there also were signs of jockeying.

Democratic candidate Francisco Alonso, a former mayor of Monterey Park, and a campaign official for Democratic actor/filmmaker Stefan "Contreras" Lysenko each said Cedillo called them shortly before filing closed and urged them to drop out. A Cedillo spokesman said the state senator was merely inviting the others to "work together" with him and did not intend to discourage them from running.

Over the weekend, Cedillo won the endorsement of the LA County Young Democrats, while Chu garnered the endorsement of the state Democratic Party.

Update On The Campaign To Impeach Jay Bybee

Since my action on Saturday to spark a grassroots movement to impeach Bush Torture Judge Jay Bybee, there have been multiple developments. With respect to the resolution at the California Democratic Party convention for impeachment, which I think could advance the ball on this greatly, my grassroots petition has gained 3,177 signatures as of 1:45pm PT. And now, I'm proud to say that the Courage Campaign, California's version of MoveOn.org, has joined the fight, urging its California residents to support this resolution so that the whole state Democratic Party speaks with one voice about the need to remove the man who justified torture from office.

When President Barack Obama released the contents of President Bush's torture memos, America learned the full extent of the horror that was unleashed at Guanatanamo Bay on detainees. One of the memos was written by Jay Bybee in August 2002. It authorized the use of waterboarding, "cramped confinement", "walling" -- where a detainee's head is repeatedly pushed against a wall -- and even putting insects into a confined space with a detainee.

Jay Bybee is now a federal judge here in California, serving on the important Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco. He has not been held accountable for the lawbreaking he committed and enabled.

The California grassroots are determined to change that. Los Angeles Democratic activists John Heaner, Agi Kessler and Richard Mathews have sponsored a resolution calling on the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Jay Bybee.

Please join the L.A. County Democratic Party, Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles, and the Crooks and Liars blog by signing your name in support of this resolution. DEADLINE: Friday 9 AM.

More groups have joined the cause. Progressive Democrats of America has a tool to ask your member of Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. The Center for Constitutional Rights are also calling for impeachment. And Jerrold Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has done the same.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Monday for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, one of the principal authors of the torture memos released last week by the Obama administration.

"He ought to be impeached," Nadler said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law."

Nadler is also calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Bybee and the other architects of torture. But I want to focus on building this movement for impeachment, because we need to start with something tangible as a means to growing this coalition. The case should be more than clear that someone with the appalling judgment to sign their name to a justification of torture simply shouldn't be sitting in judgment of other Americans. Ian Milhiser makes the legal case here:

OLC attorneys are not like other Executive Branch officials because their job is not to advance the President’s agenda or to defend the government’s actions. Rather, the purpose of OLC is to give neutral, disinterested opinions about what the law does or does not require. In this sense, the relationship between an OLC attorney and the President is more like that between a judge and a litigant than it is like that between an attorney and a client.

So Bybee’s memos instructing Executive Branch members that they could exploit a captive’s fear of stinging incects by locking him in a coffin with bugs, or nearly drown that captive, or deprive him of sleep for 11 days at a time, were not simply a lawyer offering incompetent advice on how his client could comply with the law. Rather, these memos were a total abdication of his unique role as an OLC attorney—to tell the President “no” when the law clearly and unambiguously says that what the President wants to do is illegal [...]

The Federal Torture Statute prohibits U.S. officials outside of the United States from inflicting “the threat of imminent death” on another person within his custody. Yet Bybee specifically advised the Bush Administration that they could waterboard detainees; an act which, by definintion, is intended to cause its victim to believe that they are in imminent danger of death by drowning. In other words, it is very unlikely that Bybee was actually providing legal advice to the Bush Administration—if he was, that he should be disbarred for sheer incompetence—and far more likely that he was simply seeking to apply the patina of legitimacy which an OLC opinion provides to the Adminstration’s pre-selected policies. He was far more an accomplice than an advisor.

Those Bush apologists cannot defend the indefensible. Bybee hid the truth during his confirmation hearings and should be compelled to answer for his role in perpetrating war crimes.

I believe the best way to start this is to urge the California Democratic Party to follow the lead of its branch in Los Angeles County, and resolve to impeach Jay Bybee. You can sign my petition to call on the CDP to support the resolution. And you can let the leadership of the California Democratic Party know personally your thoughts on this issue.

Sacramento Office
(916) 442-5707 phone
(916) 442-5715 fax

Los Angeles Office
(310) 407-0980 phone
(310) 407-0981 fax

email contact form

Please get involved in this growing movement. Thanks.

UPDATE: People for the American Way has just jumped aboard. From their email;

Yesterday the New York Times published an editorial calling for the impeachment of U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, for his role in trying to bend the law to justify the Bush administration's torture policies when he headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Of the memos written by Bybee, the editorial states, "These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution."

We agree.

Please speak out and urge Congress to bring impeachment charges against Jay Bybee.

UPDATE II: The Center For American Progress, a think tank, has through its American Progress Action Fund called on Congress to impeach Jay Bybee. This coalition continues to grow. And Rep. Linda Sanchez, a California Democrat and senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, released this statement:

During my time as Chairwoman of the Commercial and Administrative Law Judiciary subcommittee, I made it clear that no one is above the law and Congress should hold accountable public servants who dismiss that. Americans spoke loud and clear in November: they were fed up with the Bush administration's disregard of the law.

Bybee twisted legal reasoning to desecrate basic fundamentals of our country, and I am not comfortable with the fact that he will be on the federal bench for a lifetime appointment. While I am pleased that the Obama Administration is fulfilling pledges of transparency, I feel that if we fail to act on these detestable facts, we are sending the wrong message.

If you're not comfortable with his lifetime appointment, Rep. Sanchez, you have options. Impeach.

Torture Judge Lawyers Up

Jay Bybee seems to understand that the President is not the nation's chief prosecutor, and the release of the torture memos leaves him legally exposed. So he's done some hiring.

The Obama Administration assured CIA employees Thursday that they would not be prosecuted, but the White House has offered no cover to Bybee or other government lawyers.

So for now, Bybee is on his own. The good news, however, he’s got a nationally recognized lawyer on his side, Latham & Watkins’s Maureen Mahoney, who’s handling the case pro bono. In an e-mail Thursday, Mahoney said Bybee has recused himself from Latham cases, but offered no further comment on his case.

There are actually about a dozen cases that could fall under the 9th Circuit's purview, including a case against Bybee's former subordinate John Yoo, that Bybee has had to recuse himself from. So in addition to being morally unfit for office, Bybeecan barely fulfill the duties, he's so ethically compromised.

As Digby notes, Barack Obama actually doesn't hold the key to whether or not the architects of torture get prosecuted. That falls under the Justice Department, and all Eric Holder has said is that they'll not seek prosecution against those who followed OLC guidelines. And if they want to take it out of politics, all they have to do is appoint a special prosecutor. The nation's fabric didn't fall asunder when Scooter Libby was convicted. We can handle it.

And Russ Feingold agrees:

"I understand that the president believes that the people who actually administered these tactics should be immune. I'm not sure about that. I understand that they have a greater argument than those who created the policies. But those who created these legal theories, knowing full well that there was not a reasonable argument, I'm not so sure they shouldn't be accountable. I don't see how we as a country say oh fine we knew this was against international law, we knew it was against our own laws, and these people can come up with any phony legal opinion they want. I've read these opinions because I'm on the intelligence committee and had access to them much earlier than the public. These arguments are bogus.."

I have a petition to call on the California Democratic Party to support the resolution of impeachment for Jay Bybee. We're up to 2,824 signatures. Please add your name if you haven't already. And if you're in California, give a call to the CDP offices and let them know you'd like to see them support this resolution.

Sacramento Office
(916) 442-5707 phone
(916) 442-5715 fax

Los Angeles Office
(310) 407-0980 phone
(310) 407-0981 fax

email contact form

DFA Steps Up For True Grassroots Progress In California

I am both surprised and heartened to see DFA send their members in California information about the race for Controller of the California Democratic Party. Simply put, this is not a front-burner issue for most progressives, especially those not at the activist level inside the Party. But it's no less important, and in fact reforming the party and making it more attentive to grassroots concerns is paramount if we want to get back to leading the nation instead of lagging behind it. Let me reprint some of the email they sent to their supporters today:

Did you know DFA members first proposed a 58 County Plan to the California Democratic Party (CDP) four years ago? It's true and DFA members have worked hard to help make that commitment a reality.

This month, you have the power to make sure the 58 County Strategy is supported at the top level of the California Democratic Party.

The CDP elects officers on April 25th. DFA members told us months ago about a great grassroots activist running for Party Controller. We've followed the campaign, met the candidate and it's clear that one candidate has earned our unified support.

I'm excited to announce DFA's endorsement of Hilary Crosby for Controller of the California Democratic Party. Only delegates to the CDP can vote, but any DFA member can help Hillary win by making a few calls to delegates or contributing to her campaign.

HELP ELECT HILARY CROSBY CDP CONTROLLER

We're talking about a grassroots movement to elect the Controller of the state party. Crosby's participation at the officer level of the CDP would be a sea change, a real difference-maker in terms of having a voice committed to the 58-county strategy at the table, and willing to follow up with action instead of words. The proof of the past two cycles signals the need for a broader strategy inside the party to win contested seats. And just the model for getting her elected - through a grassroots GOTV process - makes me hopeful that she gets it, and has the right allies to bring about change within the state.

Speaking for myself, I enthusiastically support this effort to help elect Hillary Crosby, in both form and function.

New Registration Numbers Show More Increases For Democrats

The latest report of registration, current up to February 2010, shows that voters have continued to register Democratic in higher numbers even since the general election. There are now 17.3 million registered voters, 74.4% of all eligible adults, and Democrats have a 2.32 million vote advantage over Republicans. By the percentages, the state consists of 44.52% Democrats, 31.14% Republicans, and 19.99% decline to state, with smaller parties rounding out the rest of the voters.

2010 is the last year before a new census and new district lines, so the district-level numbers only apply for the next election cycle. Still, a close reading makes clear where Democrats should be focusing their registration efforts and resources for the next year.

In Congress, there are two Republican-held seats where Republicans hold less than 40% of the registration share, seen as a key dividing line. Those are Dan Lungren's CA-03 (39.7% Republican-37.7% Democratic) and, surprisingly, Buck McKeon's CA-25 (39.7% Republican-39.2% Democratic), which has changed dramatically over the past few years and could be ripe for a well-funded, legitimate challenger. With only 351,421 registered voters in CA-25, there are additional non-voters waiting to be registered there to tighten up those numbers even further. CA-19 also has a shortfall of voters which could lead to a tightening of the rolls.

In the State Senate, the only even-numbered seat (the ones up for election in 2010) that deserves a focus is SD-12, where Jeff Denham is termed out. There are 47.5% registered Democrats and 33.1% registered Republicans. Democrats in that region are fairly conservative, and so there may not be a progressive coming out of that district, but there's no reason on Earth why Democrats shouldn't own that seat. Especially since there may be 100,000 unregistered voters out there.

As for the Assembly, the numbers look good in AD-05, AD-26 (Dems have a 42-39 lead in registration), AD-30 and AD-36, with a few other marginal possibilities based solely on the voter reg. numbers (AD-38, AD-63, AD-64, and AD-65 come to mind). There is absolutely a path to pick up three seats and a 2/3 majority in the Assembly, if the net is cast wide enough.

Of course, oftentimes Democratic officials focus too much, in my view, on voter registration statistics, and shoudl recruit good candidates and give them the resources they need to compete instead. But in this off-year, registration stats offer an opportunity to determine where to target. You can dig through them yourself at the Secretary of State's page.

Burton Watch Offers Revealing Critiques Of The Man Who Would Be CDP Chair

It's been distressing to see the race for CDP chair turn from an election into a coronation, with John Burton lining up institutional support, muscling out the grassroots and forcing his competition to the sidelines. Coming off an historic Presidential election, with the demographics squarely on the side of Democrats and a new generation of activists who have boundless ideas to bring a different organizing philosophy to California, the right chairman of the Party could really leverage the energy and activity into something special, to lay the groundwork for a re-imagining of the political structure. Sadly, the best can be said of Burton is that he's an old workhorse, but there are troubling signs that he is unaware of the changes in modern campaiging, unconcerned with reforming the broken institutions both inside and outside the party, and unable to use the new energy and excitement to any decent ends. It appears that the frenetic organizing outside the party structure may be the only hope for progressives in the near term.

But it could be even worse than that. The new site Burton Watch offers a substantive critique of the former State Senator, with information that every delegate and voting member of the Party ought to know before turning over the reins to this guy. The initial post surveys how Democrats could lose California under this version of leadership:

Because the public instinctively knows that when power and money compete with the public interest, we all suffer. If you’ve ever registered voters or walked precincts for a candidate, you’ve undoubtedly been greeted with this response: “I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t matter. All politicians are the same.” And as the cynicism grows, voter turnout declines and the Decline To State registration escalates -- now approximately 20% of all Californians are registered DTS. So how do we combat the innate distrust that drives a large segment of our population to disengage from political parties and even voting? Well, Obama showed us a part of the solution [...]

When previously disenfranchised voters, minorities, and the young are all flocking to the Democratic Party because we represent a new way, a vision of hope and change, why on earth would we want to take a giant step backwards to the bad old days? And yet that’s exactly what Democrats in California are poised to do this April. The California Democratic Party, instead of rising to meet the challenges of a new millennium with openness and inclusion, is set to reach back to one of the oldest and most entrenched political machines in California history for its leadership.

Enter John Burton, California’s much older version of Rod Blagojevich. There are so many reasons why John Burton is unfit for the role of Party Chair in California, that I’ll be doing a series of posts, each one dedicated to a disqualifying aspect of his background. All of the material I’ll be using has been obtained through basic use of the google, and the state’s Republicans could easily find and use it against California Democrats. And trust me, they will.

At the end of this series, I think you’ll agree that John Burton is the wrong person to lead the California Democratic Party in 2009.

The next installment recounts perhaps the most infamous episode in Burton's past - the very public sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a former staffer, with excerpts from the complaint filed by Kathleen Driscoll in San Francisco Superior Court:

During DRISCOLL’S employment, BURTON engaged in hostile, demeaning and sexually abusive conduct such that DRISCOLL’S working conditions were significantly altered. His conduct over the past year easily rises to the level of severe or pervasive conduct for a hostile work environment sexual harassment claim both in California and under federal law. The harassing acts started in approximately September 2006. They consisted of numerous events, which took place throughout DRISCOLL’S employment, including but not limited to:
Asking DRISCOLL over the phone, “What are you wearing?” on approximately 10 occasions;

On one occasion, DRISCOLL sent a temporary employee to deliver paperwork to BURTON. BURTON ordered DRISCOLL to never send someone on her behalf again by berating her, “When you drop stuff off, stop in will ya? I mean I’m not getting laid under the fuckin’ table.”

Singling DRISCOLL out for exorbitant demands and attention, included but not limited to excessive demands for immediate and frequent meetings to go over routine matters, including on weekends after the work week was over in contrast to her co-workers;

There's more at the link, and it's pretty graphic. It goes without saying that women make up an extremely large bloc of the Democratic base.

I don't know what more Burton Watch will trot out, but here are some facts: Californians have little connection to their state government other than knowing that they don't like it. They hear things like how politicians are living high off campaign donations and it's both alienating and corrosive. The rules are already rigged in favor of a conservative wipeout of government and the last thing Democrats need as they seek to make structural changes is the spectre of an old-school pol with a lot of skeletons hanging over their collective heads. John Burton has the potential to take the state backwards and it's a chance that delegates should think long and hard about.

So You Won An Election; Now Keep Us Out Of Bankruptcy

Congratulations to those brave souls who managed to win Assembly delegate elections over the weekend. Your first state Convention, scheduled for Sacramento in April, should coincide nicely with the mass protests from folks who got IOUs instead of their expected tax refunds, the first double-digit employment numbers in the state in a generation, and essentially the near-total shutdown of state government, by design, from a working conservative majority that uses outdated and anti-majoritarian rules to destroy the state for their own ends.

I have a hard time arguing with the deep pessimism from Dan Walters today.

What, if anything, will come next to pull us out of recession and return California to prosperity? Some think it will be biotechnology, services to baby boomer retirees or solving global warming.

Lurking in the background, however, is a nagging worry that there won't be anything, that the state's endemically high costs, political dysfunction and long list of unresolved dilemmas, from transportation to water to education, have made us uncompetitive in a global economy. Just last week, a new federal survey found that California has the nation's highest adult illiteracy rate.

We have tended to take the future for granted. No matter how moribund the economy may be at the moment, we think, we have the weather, the entrepreneurial spirit and the strategic location to regroup and prosper.

We may have. But then again, maybe we aren't so special. Maybe we're not immune to the societal afflictions that have beset other states. Maybe we are a rust-belt-to-be on the left coast, a Michigan with winter sunshine.

This is not a failure of entrepreneurship or a lack of a desirable consumer base. It's quite simply a failure of politics, a series of compromises and capitulations that have led the state into a blind alley. Because legislative Democrats have never effectively rid the process of the constraints of the past, they have made the future impossible.

The biggest burst of meaningful political activism in recent history was the crusade to defeat Arnold's special election in 2005. That happened outside the party structure because labor felt threatened and needed to lead an effort, working together with the grassroots and the party establishment to fight back. There was a singular mission and nobody brought their own single-issue buckets to the table. Their public relations strategy and the activism they encouraged was nothing short of brilliant. But it was primarily a defensive maneuver. Now the CTA is trying to add a penny to the sales tax in a more offensive maneuver to secure funding for schools. This is precisely the wrong way to go. It carves out another dedicated funding source for one area while imposing a regressive tax on the state's most burdened citizens. Single-issue money grabs will not do the job. Unity is the great need of the hour.

At one of the AD meetings I attended this weekend, my Assemblywoman, Julia Brownley, got up to speak. I would call her a pretty mild-mannered woman. She practically pleaded with everyone in attendance, saying "We need your help... the Governor is breaking this state... we need you to throw your shoes at Arnold." She was sending out an urgent call for the kind of unified activism that broke Arnold's back in 2005. It's a heavier lift because it requires something proactive rather than reactive. But without labor, grassroots activists and the party establishment working in concert, this is going to be the worst 2 years of all these newly-elected delegates' lives.

There are going to be two Democratic legislative initiatives this week: a request for a federal government loan to ensure our unemployment insurance fund doesn't go broke, and legislation putting a moratorium on foreclosures, which cost roughly $250,000 each to the greater economy in opportunity costs and property value reductions. There is help coming in the form of hopefully $5-7 billion dollars from the federal recovery package, earmarked for state and local government relief. But eventually, we're going to turn to the ballot. In June of this year, there's going to be a host of initiatives, and we need there to be more than simply signing off on the bad budget of last year, but real structural reform, whether to do with 2/3 or expanding the budget cycle to 2 years or even the tax increases in the Democratic budget (The LAO thinks that election should happen earlier to relieve this crisis of confusion). These MUST get on the ballot, and they MUST pass, with a coalition of every progressive in the state working toward that passage. The survival of the state hangs in the balance.

So good for you, winners. Now make sure you don't get picketed during your first convention. Because if you don't, I'll be the first one out there with a sign.

California's Crisis of The Status Quo - And the Only Woman Who Can Fix It

There's an interesting dynamic happening in California. At the national level, the state's power is growing. Californians hold the Speaker of the House and four key committee chairs, including the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and now the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have Californians at the helm. Any energy and environmental policies will have to go through the committees of Californians, and they'll have California allies inside the Administration, with the selection of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dr. Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Other Californians are up for possible Administration jobs, like CA-31's Xavier Becerra (US Trade Representative) and CA-36's Jane Harman (CIA Director). It's a good time to be a California politician in Washington.

It's a TERRIBLE time to be a California politician in California, as it dawns on everyone in Sacramento that the state is ungovernable and hurtling toward total chaos. The two parties are miles apart from a budget deal, and even their biggest and boldest efforts would only fill about half the budget gap. The peculiar mechanisms of state government, with its 2/3 rule for budget and tax provisions, and its artificial deadlines for bills to get through the legislature, which causes remarkable bottlenecks and "gut and amend" legislation changed wholesale in a matter of hours, and the failed experiment with direct democracy which has created unsustainable demands and mandates, make the state impossible to reform and even get working semi-coherently. The state's citizens hate their government and hate virtually everyone in it with almost equal fervor, yet find themselves helpless to actually change anything about it, and believe it or not, ACTUALLY THINK THEY'RE DOING A GOOD JOB setting policy through the initiative process, which is simply ignorant (though they paradoxically think that other voters aren't doing a good job on initiatives). The activist base does amazing grassroots work, very little of it in this state. We have a political trade deficit where money and volunteerism leaves the state and nothing returns. And the political media for a state of 38 million consists of a handful of reporters in Sacramento and a couple dudes with blogs.

Many of these problems have accumulated over a number of years and cannot be laid at the feet of anybody in particular. But in general, the reason that we've gotten to this crisis point, the reason that California is a failed state, is because by and large the dominant political parties WANT IT THAT WAY. I'm not saying that the state Democratic Party or its elected officials, for example, wants the state to be flung into the sea, metaphorically speaking, but there's certainly a tendency toward the closed loops of insiders that prefer a predictable and stable status quo, that naturally restricts reform and leads to corruption, gridlock and crisis. I'll give you an example. Last night I was on a conference call where Eric Bauman, Chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, announced that he would drop out of the race for state party Chair and run for Vice-Chair, because when 78 year-old former State Senator John Burton entered the race, all his labor, organizational and elected support dried up. Fitting that he didn't mention his grassroots support, because it clearly doesn't matter who they prefer.

There is little doubt in my mind that John Burton will run the party, or rather delegate it to whatever lieutenant will run the party, in the exact same way it has been run for the last decade or so, characterized by missed opportunities to expand majorities, a lost recall election for Governor, cave-in after cave-in on key budget priorities and a failure to capitalize on the progressive wave of the last two electoral cycles. These are not abstractions, and they have real-world effects, $41.8 billion of them at last count. And honestly, the Special Assistant to Gray Davis didn't represent all that much change, either.

We have an ossified party structure, and a phlegmatic legislative leadership that is unable to get its objectives met because the deck is essentially stacked against them. The times call for a completely new vision, one that can energize a grassroots base and use citizen action to leverage the necessary unraveling of this dysfunctional government to make it work again. The work on Prop. 8 since the election has been tremendous, but ultimately, if public schools are closing and unemployment is above 10% and the uninsured are rising and the pain felt in local communities is acute, then we have a much larger problem, one that requires a bigger movement allied with the civil rights movement to make change.

The key flashpoint is the 2010 Governor's race. There is currently no one in the field with the ability to break the lock that the status quo has on California and deliver a new majority empowered to bring the state back from the brink. In an article published last month, Randy Shaw put it best.

None of the current field appears likely to galvanize a grassroots base, or to be willing to take on the “third rails” of California politics: massive prison spending, Prop 13 funding restrictions, or the need for major new education funding. Dianne Feinstein? She’ll be 77 years old on Election Day 2010, and she has long resisted, rather than supported, progressive change.

Jerry Brown just finished campaigning to defeat Proposition 5, which would have saved billions of unnecessary spending on the state’s prison industrial complex. This follows Brown’s television ads for the 2004 election, which helped narrowly defeat a reform of the draconian and extremely expensive “three strikes” law. Brown’s consistent coddling up to the prison guards union is the smoking gun showing that he is not a candidate for change.

Gavin Newsom came out against Prop 5 on the eve of the election, undermining his own “break from the past” image. He also spent another local election cycle opposing the very constituencies who an Obama-style grassroots campaign would need to attract.

With her Senate Intel. Committee post, it is unlikely that Feinstein will run. He forgets John Garamendi, who supported Prop. 2 (!) because of his fealty to farming interests and who first ran for governor in 1982.

Shaw mentions that the state is ready for a Latina governor, and mentions the Sanchez sisters. He's right in part, but has the wrong individual in mind. I am more convinced than ever that the only person with the strength, talent, grassroots appeal and forward-thinking progressive mindset to fundamentally change the electorate and work toward reform is Congresswoman Hilda Solis. She authored the green jobs bill that Barack Obama is using as a national model. She is a national leader on the issue of environmental justice and has the connections to working Californians that can inspire a new set of voters. She beat an 18-year Democratic incumbent, Matthew Martinez, by 38 points to win her first Congressional primary. She has worked tirelessly for progressive candidates across the state and the country. In a state whose demographics are rapidly changing, she could be a powerful symbol of progress that could grab a mandate to finally overhaul this rot at the heart of California's politial system once and for all. This is not about one woman as a magic bullet that can change the system; this is about a woman at the heart of a movement. A movement for justice and equality and dignity and respect. A movement for boldness and progressive principles and inclusiveness and openness. A movement that can spark across the state.

I know that Solis is interested in the Vice Chair of the Democratic caucus if Becerra takes the job in the Obama Administration. Congresswoman, your state needs you desperately. Please consider running for Governor and leaving a legacy of progress in California.

The Status Quo, Corruption, And Crisis

When Josh Richman, the fine reporter for the Oakland Tribune, called me for comment yesterday on the breaking news that Don Perata transferred $1.5 million dollars the day after the election from an IE account intended to elect Democrats to the State Senate and wage initiative campaigns into his personal legal defense fund, my initial reaction was "I'm not surprised." My slightly longer reaction is captured in the article:

David Dayen, an elected Democratic State Central Committee member from Santa Monica, blogged angrily this summer about his party's contribution to Perata's legal defense fund, contending the money would've been better spent on legislative races. The same goes for Leadership California's money, he said Wednesday; despite a Democratic presidential candidate carrying California by the largest margin since 1936, Democrats netted only three more Assembly seats and none in the state Senate.

"Every time I asked the California Democratic Party about getting more active and involved in local elections, they said the state Senate and the Assembly control those races "... and we don't have a lot of flexibility. So Perata, at that time, and Nunez or Bass had the authority to run those elections," Dayen said. "Now we see what happens when you vest power in these closed loops — suddenly self-interest becomes more important than the good of the party."

He believes this is why Perata didn't step aside as Pro Tem earlier, as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez relinquished his post to Karen Bass in May: "Darrell Steinberg was sitting there ready to go "... and we were all like, 'What the hell is going on?'

"We speculated it had to be that he still needed the leverage to make the calls to raise money for himself."

I want to expand on that. The behavior of Don Perata can be directly tied to the continuance of a status quo that has failed and is failing California families. At no time is the way elections are run - without transparency, without accountability, without meaningful checks on the potential for corruption - questioned by the powers that be. It is enabled through a shrug of the shoulders and the words "that's the way things are." What Perata did was perfectly legal, although that is subject to change, as the state Fair Political Practices Commission votes today on making such transfers illegal. But as Michael Kinsley famously said, "The scandal isn't what's illegal; it's what's legal." The bigger scandal is that there's no desire or even interest at the top to see that change. And why not - it suits them just fine.

California has 63% majorities in both chambers of the legislature, has just seen a 61% share of the vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate - and yet this state is completely, inescapably and hopelessly beholden to right-wing interests, as a function of a backwards set of governing rules that have climbed the budget hole over $40 billion dollars, without any reasonable hope of getting out of it. It's been beyond clear for several years now that the ultimate solution will come at the ballot box, and yet the state party has entrusted the most crucial elections, the ones that could net a working 2/3 majority in the Senate, to someone more concerned with saving his political hide. And so Hannah-Beth Jackson, who came within 1,200 votes of flipping a Republican seat, reads a story like this in shock and anger. And the citizens in SD-12, promised a recall of Jeff Denham; and those in SD-15, expecting a candidate in their majority-Democratic district to take on Abel Maldonado; they are similarly angry. Money they had every right to expect would go to help them now goes to help one man.

(By the way, the alibi from the defenders of Perata on this doesn't scan at all. First of all, nobody begrudges him from raising money in his own defense - the problem lies in taking that money from an account intended for campaign work. And second, if this is a "political witch hunt," as they say, why would he need this lump sum of money 75 days from the time when a Democratic Administration with no inclination to prosecute Democrats on allegedly bogus charges is about to be installed? It's either a witch hunt about to end or a going concern. The alibi is pathetic.)

But the larger point is that the status quo, the closed systems at the top of the Democratic leadership, the lack of transparency and accountability, create the crises we see in our state, or at least disable anyone from reacting to them. And this is not likely to change. John Burton is going to be the next state CDP Chair. He's been in politics for 205 years, and he's basically muscled out the competition for the job. Does anyone think that a lifelong pol, with a long history of backroom deals, the guy who was Arnold Schwarzenegger's cigar-smoking buddy (that seems like a good profile for the opposition party chair), gives a damn about urgently needed reform? He's making sweet little noises about turning red areas blue, but there's absolutely no hope that he will provide any change from the insular, chummy, mutual backscratching society that exists in Sacramento. Grassroots activists should be furious that, in the wake of seeing countless opportunities wasted and crises lengthened, we're boldly taking off into the future with a Party Chair who was first elected in 1965.

The future of California is a mystery right now, because there is a crisis of leadership and an unwillingness to reform. At the very least, activists should look to electing Hillary Crosby as State Party Controller so that someone in the room will have a reform message that can spark a modicum of change. But until the fundamentals are altered, we will lurch from one disaster to the next.

CDP E-Board Notes

I was only able to attend the Saturday session of this weekend's e-board meeting, under the strange and foreboding Anaheim skies - the fire in Chino Hills nearby blotted out the sun during the midday, you could actually stare right into it - but there were some interesting happenings:

• The Progressive Caucus meeting featured a debate between two candidates for party controller, Eric Bradley (the incumbent) and progressive challenger Hillary Crosby. It was good of both of them to come to the caucus and express their views, but Bradley's contentions (some would call them alibis) for why the party didn't do quite as well in downballot races this year were kind of preposterous. First, he claimed that money moved into some races late because nobody knew Barack Obama would do as well as he did. This is insulting on a variety of levels. First of all, Obama was leading by as much as 28 points in some polls as far back as June, and was never seriously threatened in any polling. Second of all, I don't see how it matters, in terms of who you spend money on, how a race that is out of your control is faring. The next thing that Bradley said, echoing something I hear a lot at these CDP meetings, is that we cannot disclose information to the membership of the party on financing because "we cannot let the Republicans know what we're doing." We might as well let them know, considering that hiding the information hasn't brought us much good. Also, the entirety of the information that Crosby and progressives like her are seeking is a) already readily available in FPPC and FEC reports and b) sought AFTER THE FACT so we can make intelligent decisions about what worked and what didn't. There is a bias toward secrecy there that is quite disconcerting.

• In the general session, there was a continued set of numbers given to prove that the CDP did everything it could to win downballot races. Art Torres mentioned 1 million live GOTV calls and $12.5 million spent. These are all nice numbers (although Obama's California campaign made 1 million calls a day in the week leading up to the election), but if the results are essentially nothing, recapturing seats that were gerrymandered to benefit Democrats to begin with, then the question of effectiveness must be asked. We had a very good session about that with a group of committed activists who ran phonebank operations and local headquarters and state campaigns, and the information was very illuminating. First of all, we have got to end the practice of being one of the only two states in the country not using the DNC Voter File and VAN software. The data is supposedly better in the current set we use, but that can be bought out and integrated into the VAN. I heard about numerous problems with the statewide Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that made it essentially useless.

Second, there needs to be more empowerment at the local level. The stories I heard from the organizers at DP-SFV (the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley) on how they funded their headquarters and made the best use of volunteer time, for example, was great. In the last week, however, the folks running the campaigns from Sacramento got very top-down in their approach and made all kinds of mistakes that the locals had to fix. It discouraged volunteers and organizers at the local level.

Finally, there has to be off-cycle organizing so that prospective volunteers are brought up with a culture of impacting their own communities instead of driving off to Nevada every four years. This includes finding and capturing the local groups who worked so tirelessly for Obama this year. They need to have it explained and drilled into them why staying local and effecting change inside California is so important. And organizers need to be paid year-round to help bring that about. Finally, they need to be in EVERY county, not just the populous ones or the most contested ones, to impact those statewide races for 2010. For his part, Chairman Torres said he is committed to finding organizers and capitalizing on all the energy we see now, and I think we need to hold him to that.

• The above steps make a good criteria for the next party chair, and that race was the buzz of the session. Right now we have three candidates: Eric Bauman, chair of the LA County Democratic Party; Alex Rooker, current first Vice-Chair; and the legendary John Burton, former State Senate leader and Congressman. At first I figured that Burton would have locked up so many endorsements from legislators who he's known forever that this might not be much of a race; however, Rooker won the endorsement of the CDP Labor Caucus, which is very significant (if not totally surprising, as Rooker has longstanding ties to labor). I don't know if you're aware of who pays for campaigns in California, but the labor community could have a lot to say about who's the next state party chair. In addition, a tough three-way fight with two candidates from the North and one from the South could give the Southern California candidate an advantage.

I'm inviting all of the candidates to visit us at Calitics and offer their vision of where they want to take the party.