A good package deal

Members of a joint legislative committee will meet in Sacramento on Monday to discuss a package of bills intended to sweep away the state’s current dysfunctional budget process, return a measure of self-determination to cities, counties and school districts, tame the out-of-control initiative industry and refocus the Legislature, at least a bit, on governmental performance and oversight. If lawmakers put the interests of Californians ahead of their own political ambitions, they will send the bills -- the product of their own work and the independent, bipartisan organization known as California Forward -- through their budget committees and onto the floors of the Assembly and Senate for an April vote, then to the governor for signature and ultimately to voters for final approval in November.

There is a lot at stake. Californians have spent more than three decades pontificating, legislating and voting ourselves into an ungovernable knot, but it is not until now, in the midst of an economic meltdown, that we have felt the full impact of those decisions -- and the decisions of our elected representatives and those who influence them. Confidence in Sacramento is low, desire for change strong. But in this election year, only a few weeks -- perhaps even just a few days -- remain before clear thinking is finally overcome by the dizzying warmth of TV-spot slogans and the intoxicating hope of full-scale, scorched-earth partisan victory.

Democrats and Republicans, progressives and populists, liberals and conservatives already are donning their campaign armor. But they would do themselves, and their state, a big favor if they would stop for just a moment, consider and perhaps improve the work by California Forward and the special joint legislative committee, and move it along to voters before lowering their political visors for battle on June 8 and again on Nov. 2.

Some suspicious Democrats, especially those of a more progressive bent, see the package as a bid by well-meaning but naive good-government liberals and business interests to move the state to the center-right, all for the sake of blocking more sweeping, leftward-looking solutions. Why, they want to know, should we embrace a measure to, at long last, dismantle the destructive two-thirds vote requirement for adopting budgets and put in place the majority rule that forms the basis of American democracy, if the two-thirds rule is left in place for adopting taxes and majority rule is tied to a Republican-oriented pay-as-you-go budget requirement?

This concern warrants at least three responses. First, Democrats are moving separately on a ballot measure to adopt majority votes on both budgeting and taxes, and there is nothing inconsistent in supporting that effort while simultaneously backing the California Forward plan. The Times has long supported efforts to dump the two-thirds rule, and didn’t back away from it even while supporting the drive for a constitutional convention -- and even though it was entirely possible that a convention would decide to keep two-thirds as part of a consensus effort that made other changes. The convention drive petered out, but The Times still supports majority votes on both budgeting and taxes -- while recognizing that the California Forward package is a step forward from the status quo.

Second, despite repeated railing by Democrats and newspaper editorial pages against the two-thirds rule, polling generally suggests that Californians want to keep it, and previous efforts to dismantle it have gone nowhere. It’s good to have the California Forward proposal as a backup plan.

Third, the other parts of the package aren’t merely sops to Republicans. Requiring the Legislature to identify funding before adopting bills that will cost the state more than $25 million a year is a solid, fiscally responsible suggestion, and will cause problems for Democrats only in those few instances when they act like the cartoonish tax-and-spend liberals described by their Republican counterparts. The provision that blocks lawmakers from getting paid when the budget is late may be a transparent bid for populist support, but it’s not utterly unreasonable, and as long as Democrats remain the majority, the fate of their paychecks will be in their own hands. Multi-year budgeting is a wise, nonpartisan improvement over the current one-day-at-a-time approach to planning and paying.

Meanwhile, wary Republicans worry that the package has been shaped by a committee headed by two Democrats, Assemblyman Mike Feuer of Los Angeles and Sen. Mark DeSaulnier of Walnut Creek, and embraced by new Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, a Democrat from Los Angeles. And isn’t that reason enough to reject it? After all, an election year is no time to acknowledge that the political opposition has actually responded to Republican demands.

But Republicans should recognize that this package offers them a real shot to achieve some of the substantive reforms they claim to want, including more responsible pay-as-you-go and performance-based budgeting. If they reject it now, they will reveal that they are less interested in the substantive changes they have sought than in retaining the political power that comes with hanging on to just over a third of each house in a system that awards spoiling rights to the minority party.

The promise of bipartisan reform is also its Achilles heel -- it’s bipartisan, which means it denies clear victory to one side or the other. But the effort by the joint committee and by California Forward, led by former Democratic Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and Republican Thomas McKernan, chief executive of the Automobile Club of Southern California, should not be seen as a kind of centrist effort to split the difference. California does that too much already, with mutually negating ballot measures and a balance of power that ensures that everyone has only enough power to block anyone else from getting anything done.

The package does nothing to prevent vigorous, rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred politicking. But it could redefine some of the rules of engagement so that the fight is more honest, so that the winners and losers are more responsible -- and so that fewer Californians are injured while observing the fray.