Twenty sound pretty good until you remember what it looks like on the C-Span call-in line.
Democrats call in and support Democrats.
Republicans call in and support Republicans.
People claiming not to be from either party call in and support Democrats by 85% or more.
With the California Legislature in control in California, how can I trust that this commission won’t be packed with people who are friendly to the majority party?
How is this really going to change things? I remain unconvinced. What we have now isn’t working either. That’s for damned sure.
What I fear is something similar to what the schools do every five years or so. They announce that they ARE STILL FAILING to teach our kids, and come up with another idea that is assured of failure.
Is this plan assured of failure? I am almost convinced it is.
If someone has something convincing to explain to me on the subject, I’d love to hear it. I’d like to be able to support it.
That goes right to the heart of the matter; how are the bipartisan commissions chosen? Tom McClintock seems to trust the process and that's a pretty good indication to me that we can trust it. But you're right to ask the question and now I want to know how they're chosen myself!
D1 — I share your concerns and expressed them a year or two ago when this was originally put on the ballot and passed. Among my concerns then: the commission is another step removed from the voter who has no ability to kick those people off the committee. BUT — some of those folks who worked in Sacramento seemed to believe this was an improvement (e.g. Tom McC, Ray Haynes, etc), so I was willing to give it a go and see if it works.
There are a lot of criteria included on how the commission is established. So, it shouldn’t be like C-Span — but time will tell.
At the time, they wrote the law to cover only California state officers. That seemed silly to have the legislature drawing districts for Congress and the Commission to go through a separate exercise for state officers. We’ll know how well this works after they draw the lines based on the 2010 census.
Personally, I’d still like the whole thing to get replaced by a computer model.
And if it fails, seeing how easy Prop 27 got on the ballot shortly after passage of Prop 11, we have the next eight years to qualify an initiative with any necessary changes, and we'll have empirical data to prove our case.
So I am willing to give this panel a chance.
I know one of the criteria was that one could not have been on a party central committee for the past ten years, which disqualified me from considering applying, so this takes some of the hard-core political party activists out of the running (not all, but some is better than none).