Posted on 02/16/2010 12:48:48 AM PST by thecodont
Fifteen months ago, it seemed possible that Californians might finally be able to loosen the death grip in which the political establishment held their state. That was when voters narrowly adopted a measure that allows citizen commissioners, rather than the Legislature, to draw legislative district lines every 10 years. Redistricting reform was a victory for those who believe that politicians ought to serve the people rather than the two major parties and their web of political lawyers, campaign consultants, fundraisers and advisors.
Last week, the empire struck back. Three times.
...
First came the end of the once-promising drive for a state constitutional convention. Leaders of Repair California announced that they had taken in only a fraction of the money needed to mount a credible initiative campaign, and complained of being frozen out by the for-profit signature-gathering industry, which they say believed a convention might mean fewer initiatives and therefore less business for them.
...
Last week's second blow came when the Assembly rejected Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) as lieutenant governor. ... But in voting to keep him out of the inconsequential position, more than half of the Assembly's Democrats showed they're far more comfortable locked in interminable fights with old-school, no-new-taxes-ever Republicans than in helping a moderate pragmatist who is sponsoring a June open-primary ballot measure to blunt the power of both parties.
The final blow was the revelation that Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) and more than a dozen Democrats in Congress have together donated $160,000 from their political treasuries for a November ballot measure to scrap Proposition 11 -- the same 2008 redistricting measure described above that caught them by surprise when it passed. They want to wrest back their power to pick their own voters before the reform affects a single election season.
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(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I thought that measure failed.
They’re trying to fight it huh?
A Constitutional convention would deftly remove every protection and right of ordinary CA citizens, and install a permanent Marxist dictatorship of protected class elitists.
Abel Maldonado (R-turncoat-Santa Maria) got the standard Rat treatment of no-longer-useful turncoats.
And to feign surprise at an immediate plan to overturn redistricting, please, even birds won't read the Slime before they dump on it.
Take your petition and shove it!!!!
I was one once, in college. We sure got paid a lot less per signature than they do now! And I had no clue what my initiatives were really about. One was for Jai Alai betting??
We didn’t care. We just hit movie lines and beaches and thought it was a good way to make a couple bucks.
Good way to get an initiative to qualify for the ballot. You were doing God's work.
Exactly. Imagine every fringe group demanding something. It would make the planning/construction for the Bay Bridge replacement a piece of cake; every freak group wanted a say in how the bridge was designed and constructed so it took years to get a plan and the delay resulted is huge cost overruns.
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