Early in 2009, hundreds of citizens gathered in a hotel ballroom in Sacramento and calmly discussed a radical idea: a complete overhaul of California’s constitution. The meeting came on the heels of a protracted budget crisis that left the state without cash for its payroll. Several state offices, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, were shut down temporarily to conserve funds, and employees were forced to take furloughs. The budget dispute eventually ended when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature struck a deal to cut spending and raise some taxes and fees, but that solution did not satisfy the group of business and labor leaders, teachers, public interest group members, and concerned citizens that had gathered in Sacramento.
The group called for nothing less than a constitutional convention, to be initiated at the ballot box unless the legislature acted first. This had become necessary, they argued, because the state’s executive leadership, bureaucracy, and ideologically polarized legislature had been unable to solve a host of simmering problems. Besides the budget fiasco, there were underfunded schools, overcrowded prisons, and an infrastructure in tatters. California’s government was “broken,” they declared, and the only solution was to throw out the 130-year-old document and begin anew.
The forum was a sign of the growing frustration over the failure of government institutions to meet the challenges of the largest and most diverse state, the largest agricultural producer and home to the largest urban population, a state with extreme concentrations of wealth and poverty, the world’s eighth-largest economy. The once-utopian Golden State was facing serious problems.
Much has happened since the first edition of this book appeared. The recall election of Governor Gray Davis was the kind of spectacle that could happen only in California. Using the instrument of direct democracy, a well-funded group forced a special election to remove an unpopular governor less than one year into his second term, replacing him with a Venice Beach bodybuilder-turned-movie star. The record $43 billion deficit that Schwarzenegger faced at the end of 2008 was even larger than the gap in the state’s finances that sparked the recall of his predecessor.
The second edition of Rethinking California features a number of additions, including a discussion of the politics and the mechanics of the recall. A new chapter on direct democracy includes an expanded discussion of the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, and it considers why they figure so prominently in California politics. Finally, this new edition features supplemental readings from a variety of sources. These selections from literature, essays, and political biographies in each chapter add lively contemporary and historical voices to our treatment of the subjects.
This book is dedicated to our families: Ann, Tara, Diane, Arlo, Tobin, Jonah, and Steven.
Matthew Alan Cahn
H. Eric Schockman
David M. Shafie