Politicians are strategic actors. They plan. They scheme. They compromise when they think it will get them what they want, and they hold out for a better deal when they think it won’t. When legislators can’t reach a compromise position (on a budget, or on health care, or on immigration, or anything else), it’s not because one side or another is too radical. It’s because each legislator has decided that his voters or his conscience won’t let him support the same idea that some other legislator insists MUST be in the bill to slake his own constituency or conscience. Political compromise, then, is about convincing legislators about what their own constituents will or won’t support, and it’s about trading them something that they must have for something that I must have. It’s a long, hard, ugly process, and if there is any other alternative that might still give the legislators what they want, then you better believe that they will take it.

I mention this because there’s a really dumb idea espoused in a New York Times op-ed piece today by a couple of California law professors who don’t seem to appreciate any of those things. They are fed up with the annual budget stalemates in California, so they propose that in the future, any budgetary stalemate be solved by taking a randomly selected group of voters from around the state, taking them to Sacramento, and asking them to take two weeks to look at three alternate budget proposals (a Democratic plan, a Republican plan, and a Governor’s plan), and to choose the best of them. The one that they choose would immediately become law. This voters jury would only become reality when the budgetary stalemate went past four weeks, and could do nothing except pick one of the three plans.

The authors of the op-ed assert “a number of benefits” from this proposal. These supposed benefits include: timely budgets, moderate budgets, clearer accountability, and “a strong popular voice in government, without demanding too much of citizen participants”. Personally, I think that those assertions show just how out of touch with reality this proposal really is.

First let’s ask ourselves a question: why is the California budgetary situation so bad? The biggest problem in California is that budgets must pass with two-thirds of the legislators, instead of merely half. So let’s say that you had a legislature that was half Democrats and half Republicans. A budget, in order to pass muster, would have to be acceptable to every single Democrat (from the guy representing the most liberal parts of San Francisco to the guy representing the moderate farm-country interests of the Central Valley) and also be acceptable to more than one-third of Republicans. That’s not an easy task. Oh, and I didn’t mention that California has closed primaries–meaning that only registered Republicans can vote in a GOP primary and registered Democrats in a Democratic primary. That tends to mean more conservative Republicans and more liberal Democrats–making that 2/3 number that much harder to achieve.

And then there is the proposition system. Let’s say that the only way to get those two-thirds of legislators to agree on a budget is to raise the state sales tax by half a percent. Well, the state legislature cannot raise taxes without a referendum. Before they could pass that budget, they would need to get voter approval for the sales tax increase. Well, voters don’t like raising taxes, and so if anyone out there tells them that there is a viable alternative (like the other 1/3 of state legislators, plus the extremely active “citizens tax groups” that exist in California for the sole purpose of fighting any and every tax increase), then there is a good chance that the measure will fail. Or, let’s say that the state legislature wants to shift money this fiscal year from road maintenance to elementary school construction. Well, that has to go before the voters too, because a few years ago the voters decided that a large percentage of gas-tax revenue must go to road work.

So now let’s go back to this proposal made by the law professors. They claim that their proposal will result in timely, moderate budgets. Actually, it will result in budgets that are consistently six weeks late and which alternate between moderate, extremely liberal, and extremely conservative. Why? Because their random selection of voters will essentially be a crap-shoot. Legislators will quickly realize that they have two choices on any given issue: a) compromise, or b) hold firm and hope that the jury agrees with them. And even if only a few legislators decide that option (b) is preferably on any given issue, there are hundreds of issues that need to be worked out to pass a budget. Right now, legislators have a choice of compromising today, compromising tomorrow, or shutting down the government (in which case everyone looks bad). Under the new proposal, the options would be compromise today or let the voters decide tomorrow (where the voters are just as likely to side with me as with my opponent). Well, maybe then waiting looks pretty good.

Which begs the question, what will the proposals sent to the citizens jury look like? The governor must play the game that governor’s always play: appear just liberal (or conservative) enough to appeal to the base, and yet also just moderate enough to appeal to independents. So his budgetary proposal is likely to be generally moderate, although with a few choice bones thrown to his base constituency. On the other hand, no individual Democrat or Republican can be tagged with the Democrat or Republican proposal. Moreover, because of the closed primary system and the wide variance in political alignment between districts, there are quite a lot of very liberal Democrats with very liberal constituencies and very conservative Republicans with very conservative constituencies.

Moreover, there are only three options: your side wins, the governor wins (which isn’t good, but isn’t terrible), or the other guy wins (which is bad). Given that situation, I might as well bet as much as I can on my own side–which means that my own proposal should be as extreme as I can make it. Moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats can always just go back and tell their districts that they fought hard and lost–but really, because of the dynamics I pointed to above, the caucuses are ruled by the hard-core liberals and conservatives anyway, so their concerns aren’t a big deal.

So then you take these proposals and you give them to a randomly selected group of voters, who you’ve flown to Sacramento to spend two weeks of their lives reading budget documents and listening to politicians and economists. It’s jury duty, but longer and without the sex, drugs, and/or violence. These people aren’t going to make rational decisions about what is best for the state of California. These people are going to be bored out of their minds and will make the decision for the guy who has the most entertaining and likable witnesses. The governor, being that he already has high name recognition and is probably decently liked, will have an advantage. But not a huge one, once each side trots out their litany of star witnesses. The jury will quickly turn into a popularity contest between witnesses and the upshot is that anyone could win any given year.

And so one year California will cut back massively on Medicare and Medicaid, and the next year it will fund them through the roof. One year California will take an excessive pro-business, damn the seals stance–the next, protected seal and condor habitats will crop up all over the state.

Oh, and did I mention that their proposal does nothing to reverse the idiotic rules that require tax increases to be passed by the people or to overturn the 100 years of the California people deciding that the flavor of the month cause just has got to be funded no matter what?

It’s a downright dangerous proposal, and I’ve lost some respect for the New York Times for publishing it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Debt and Deficit, Legal Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.