From the Speaker of the California Assembly,
in a Q & A with the L.A. Times:
How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature's work?
The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair.
Let's just savor it again, in slow motion. A terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." Why do we allow that kind of terrorism to exist? I don't know. It's free speech -- I guess. But it's unfair. Extremely.
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
To be more precise, a closed primary. A jungle primary like in Louisiana remedies the problem (but not entirely) of nominating extreme partisans that occurs in CA, on both sides.
Down with representative democracy!
The fact that California allows state legislators to be subject to a recall vote at any time by a petition signed by 20% of the vote in the last election does put a high amount of pressure on legislators.
This isn't even talking about Californa's absurd ballot initiative system that pushes unfunded mandates on the state and then refuses to vote to fund them.
It's just part of the "criticizing me is censoring me" theme popular in some parts. (C.f. Canadian censor-in-chief Jennifer Lynch complaining that criticism of government censorship causes "reverse chill" of government employees, certain commentators claiming that being called out on racist speech "silences" them, etc.)
Even though she is Speaker of the Assembly, only people in her district can vote for her in an election. Given the gerrymandered nature of CA districts, it's highly unlikely for her to loose.
Also, tar and feathering is illegal under cruel and usual.
Just like al queda or Hamas does.
Read the whole interview. She does not seem to care much for democracy in general.
I don't know, does Palestinian Legislature require 2/3 vote to raise taxes?
Calling California democracy "more than a little too far toward mob rule for my taste" is not the same as saying legislators are the subject of terrorist threats because their constituents will vote them out if they don't follow their wishes.
Voters in a closed primary are not the same as a legislator's constituents.
And I'd say extreme gerrymandering is more responsible for the lack of moderates in California. And the public reacted to the gerrymandering by enacting an initiative that requires 2/3 vote to raise taxes. Checks and Balances.
And in this quote, after blaming everybody else, and complaining that it's "the system" that's at fault, she turns around and refuses to participate in fixing the system.
Be gone, you unserious hack.
you forgot about the part where the public also enacted the ability to vote themselves public money with a bare majority.
point taken, but I'm taking it for a given that politicians say absurd things. It's not limited to one party, do I really need to bring up the Pete Hoekstra meme?
I'm Sorry. Your statement makes no sense. The gerrymandering was not unilateral, but done by both parties to protect the incumbent party. The gerrymandering only blocks moderates in conjunction with closed primaries.
Perhaps if the legislature would do a better job of representing the people, the people would loosen the reins.
Also, considering that expenditures in CA are up from $138B in 2000 to $198B in 2009 (source: CA dept of Finance) shrinking the State government doesn't seem all that radical.
But the Speaker is right, such a primary system is unfair to political moderates, though I don't think Speaker Bass is one.
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Also unfair to anyone with the notion that things are more complicated that sound bites.
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Notice how she is not honest enough to even mention what she is talking about, increased taxes.
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Much of the spending in CA is mandated by binding referendums. Of course, the fact that democracy allows for people to vote for spending one day and turn down the tax increase require to fund it the next is not a fatal flaw in the system, but it's a pretty big one right now.
Up with rule by judicial fiat.
All Hail Sotomayor!!!
Mike, at least a third of those expenditures are mandated by referendum! The People are the ones driving spending, for instance (from this SfGate article)
That's 1/4 of the budget mandated right there. MediCal and other mandated spending are in the tens of billions as well.
Those damn terrorist voters! How dare they keep their money from us!
Again, how dare they refuse to let us raise taxes AFTER THEY MANDATE $100BN IN SPENDING THROUGH REFERENDUMS.
It is pretty damned unfair to be in the legislature (of course, they have to suck it up and deal with it because the voters are allowed to be unfair) --- you have to play the "bad guy" because you can't touch the spending that is mandated by referendum and you can't raise taxes to pay for it.
Well, it might be sacrosanct to the politicos, but it ain't to me. Balance your budget. Or leave, if you can't do your job.
Or wait 'til Obama prints up fresh money and hands it over to you, I guess.
They can touch the other stuff, however, and in both places, they'd rather not do it. They'd rather not do their jobs.
The only question is, will you give them cover while they fail to do their job? I don't.
Well, they sure show up in all these legislator's rear view mirrors.
I'm not sure what sort of tax increase could guarantee a balanced budget if they do not cut spending at the same time. .....and they are loathe to even begin cutting.
Every estimate of the deficit has increased as the months go by. I'm not sure $24 Billion is the limit so even if they do balance it on paper via some taxes and some cuts I'm not sure the taxes will meet expectations.
Jeez, you're right. I guess it is terrorism then. :-).
If government employees wish to remain exempt from the responsibility their fellow citizens accept to consider the value, and thus the cost, of the goods and services they produce, they should be willing to pay a price for the privilege.
And?
If the referendum-mandated expenditures grow excessively, and raising taxes is not possible, then the non-referendum-mandated expenditures have to shrink. What's the big mystery?
Where'd you get this number? A quick search turns up this source which says we're 10th (not that 10th is all that great anyway).
The expenses which aren't mandated by referendum tend to be things like police, fire, and prisons. A responsible state legislator might well be reluctant to cut those.
BTW, couple Bass's remarks with the following from Budget Conference Committee chair Noreen Evans:
"Well, there is this mantra out there ‘live within our means’, and while that sounds really nice, it sounds really simple, and it sounds really responsible, its meaningless. Our means are completely within our control."
How long until the California legislature votes to dissolve the people and elect another?
Nick
And CA is gerrymandered, but the fairest redistricting in the world wouldn't change state gov't much. The people have gerrymandered themselves; folks have tried to draw (proposed) district lines any number of nonpartisan ways, and you still get a huge majority of safe districts and a handful (with luck) of competitive ones. You still get idiotically-shaped districts meant to preserve this or that Congressman's seat — I think there was a Contra Costa County district in the roll call of gerrymanders I saw on Slate last year — but for the most part, any chunk of this state large enough to represent a district is solidly in the hands of one party or the other.
Why? Cut the budget, that is all. Either you cut staff, or you cut their wages and benefits. What am I missing here?
Many excuses in this thread. Many apologists. Many making excuses for politicians. We all know the solution here, and it is within reach, but some seem determined to cover for the politicians who are refusing to reach for it.
So Obama will print some cash, hand it over to those politicians, and make the next generation pay for it.
Bad deal here. Very bad.
Which is the only thing stopping the CA legislature from indulging its insatiable addiction to more taxes.
In any case, as NickM notes, for the most part these referenda require percentages, not raw dollars, to be spent.
Given that the referendum mandated expenditures make up mostly "welfare" type spending, the things outside of the mandated spending tend to be things like police and roads.
Yeah, they can be cut, but take a guess at what happens to legislators who propose slashing police budgets (hint the governor had a movie with a similar name)
The mass of men cast votes of quiet desperation.
Query: What obligation do bloggers who link to articles have not to misrepresent their subjects, given that many readers will not in fact follow the link and read the whole thing?
The bottom-line is that this statement is nothing more than frustrated hyperbole from an otherwise reasonable person.
While I personally agree with this, that's not the majority view. Nor is it the view of those who are blocking tax increases here in CA.
Regardless, I'm not much impressed by demands to cut the spending (even if I agree) when the budget process is undemocratic. Given all the screaming about majority rule I see on this site when it comes to things like gay marriage, I find it hard to take seriously those who fail to demand the same principle for the basic functions of republican government like taxes and spending.
If you're going to say that, then it falls to you to quote something that you think moderates the tone of the interview by balancing out this particular part.
Anything in particular?
60 years of Democratic party rule has gotten us into this place, along with the gerrymandering of districts to protect incumbents. The problems are self evident.
Those who blame Prop 13 are also mistaken. California state revenues grew at an unbelievable rate for almost 20 years straight with a pause in 2000-2001, and yet the state outspent these revenues by a consistent 25%/year. Iy is simply fiscal insanity.
The Democratic party leadership is, in fact, extremist. Meet with them sometime, as I have, and most reasonable people would agree.
David, how many times would she need to use variants of the word "terrorism" in describing the actions of her political opponents before you found it objectionable? She managed three.
A majority of people decided that they wanted 2/3 of their representives to agree before raising taxes. What's undemocratic about that?
No. Color me old fashioned, but I happen to think majority rule is a pretty good principle for most things, and certainly for tax and spending decisions.
Let’s back up a minute and consider just how far the principle of majority rule extends. If we take the term “republic” literally as a system of majority rule, a majority could decide today to elect a President and tomorrow to abolish the office. It could order the destruction of another city, then change its mind and recall the executioners by a faster ship (as, in a famous case, the Athenians, under a “pure” democracy, actually did). Madison commented on this sort of instability in Federalist 10: “The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished…”
Even solving this problem by the various limitations a republic places on direct democracy, though, doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. Suppose that the majority today voted to give all power to a dictator and end the whole business of majority rule from this point on. Should we treat that decision – made by majority vote, after all – as a legitimate example of republican government?
In my view, we should not. We have to think of majority rule in both the short term and the long term. Sometimes a decision can be “majoritarian” in the short term, but tyrannical in the long term (like my example of electing a dictator). A political system which considers itself republican not only must make decisions on the basis of majority rule today, it must preserve the ability to make such decisions into the future. Majorities can’t vote majority rule out of existence, nor can they freeze in place the particular majority of a given place and time. A “republic” which votes today to give all power to a dictator is no longer a republic, it’s just a dictatorship.
There are some types of "hyperbole" that sensible people, however "frustrated," try to avoid, and I'd suggest that one of them is equating legislators' constituents with terrorists.
MarkField,
If the budget process in CA allowed a minority to approve spending or tax increases over the objections of the majority, you'd have a better case. But requiring a supermajority to undertake a government action (as distinct from preventing one) isn't that uncommon.
Indeed, lots of people (me included) think CA would have a better constitution if it were not possible to amend it by simple majority vote in a referendum. Would changing this be "undemocratic," or what?
In the 100 years from 1899 to 1999, CA had exactly 3 Democratic governors. While the legislature has been generally Democratic for the last 40 years or so, even that isn't exclusively true and for most of the time before that the Republicans had control.
Random question: Given the countermajoritarian features of the US system (the Electoral College, the supermajority requirements for amending the Constitution, &c.), do you consider that we're living in a republic?
I don't understand this argument at all. In the first place, I think it's very uncommon indeed to require a supermajority to undertake government action. As I understand it, only 2 or 3 other states have a 2/3 requirement for budgets. The US Constitution has NO supermajority rules except (1) veto overrides and (2) treaty approval.
Constitutional change is traditionally (at least in the US) one of those things which requires more than a majority. Even that, though, is something I'd agree with if it were done more deliberately in the form of a Convention with ratification. Piecemeal amendments tend to cause the instability Madison described in Federalist 10.
But this seems besides the point at hand, which is limited to tax and spending decisions. On that score, we have 700 years of Anglo-American tradition that these are majority rule issues.
Before I answer that, let me say that I'm not opposed to countermajoritarian features. As Madison noted in Federalist 10, there are weaknesses to any system of majority rule and we need to balance those out in order to keep the system running in the long term. We have lots of those in place (two houses of Congress, presidential veto, judicial review, etc.), so the only real question is whether we need the additional ones you mentioned.
I'd describe the EC and the unrepresentative Senate, as seriously unrepublican (the EC being so, of course, because the Senate is). I feel in good company on this score, since Madison felt the same way.
As far as amendments go, I'd prefer to see the process done by majority rule as long as that majority represents the "permanent and aggregate interests" (Madison's phrase) of the nation. Something like ratification by a majority of those eligible to vote at 2 consecutive presidential elections would be a significant improvement.
But, see, the 2/3 requirement is something that the populace could remove any time it wants by referendum, given how easy it is to amend the CA constitution. You might need 2/3 of the Legislature to pass a budget right now, but it only takes 1/2 of whoever bothers to vote in a special election to alter that.
But this seems besides the point at hand, which is limited to tax and spending decisions. On that score, we have 700 years of Anglo-American tradition that these are majority rule issues.
And were this a matter of common law, that might actually be dispositive. Unfortunately, CA citizens seem to think that they can make and enforce their own laws. Bummer.
"The expenses which aren't mandated by referendum tend to be things like police, fire, and prisons. A responsible state legislator might well be reluctant to cut those."
Especially when she relies on the support of those unions for reelection. Why this should be determinative for the rest of the citizens is a mystery.
I mean, really. Any time the Legislature wants to go to the people with a proposed cut in education spending, or even just a freeze on its rate of growth, they can. If the people rejected such a proposal, then it would make sense to blame the people for their unreasonable education spending demands.
But the Legislature didn't propose budget cuts for bloated programs. They instead proposed tax increases as 1A and a spending increase as 1B. That is, they wanted the people to authorize tax-and-spend.
I seem to recall that was the complaint several years ago in a mid-western state. That people from the other party voted and suddenly the weak candidate was the winner.
Would someone explain how a closed primary is the problem, I am obviously missing something.
I don't see the point of this argument. Putting aside the "friction" involved in the process of removing the 2/3 rule, it simply dodges the point: these decisions should be made by majority vote. As I said above, majorities don't get to freeze themselves in place by placing hurdles in the way of new majorities.
This is just plain silly. The whole point of a 2/3 rule is that CA citizens canNOT make their own decisions. They have to cave in to the whims of a minority. Nice try, but you can't use the rhetoric of democracy to undermine the substance of it.
In any case, I thought tradition and precedent were important to so-called conservatives. CA's supermajority rules are nearly unprecedented in the whole history of Western democracy (as I said, only a couple other states have them) and they're recent (very recent in the grand scheme of things). They are a fundamental departure from long-standing rules, and they radically undermine representative government, with a result which everyone -- left and right alike -- agrees is dysfunctional. Why that would be attractive to "conservatives" is hard to imagine for anyone who's charitable.
Yeah, there's abuse in those areas, but the fact remains that police, fire and prisons are core functions of government which even libertarians support. I can't see how it's in anyone's interest to eliminate them.
No, the point is that 2/3 of the representatives have to agree to raise taxes, because a majority of the people want it that way. Since when is a supermajority undemocratic? If we decided we wanted a 2/3s majority to pass all laws, how would that be undemocratic?
I was having a problem understanding your argument MarkField, so I consulted the Democrat’s political dictionary in order to figure out what you are saying. Let me see if I got it correct. It states that if Republicans cut the rate of increase (i.e., from 6% to 4%), they are implementing a spending cut. Therefore, it follows that if Republicans implement an actual spending cut in a program they are eliminating the program. By George, I think I’ve got. I can now think like a Democrat.
It would be undemocratic since majority rule is a core principle of republican government. I agree that we can deviate from that in a few cases and still call the government republican. But we can't do so in the most important aspects of government -- and taxes and spending surely are that -- and still do so.
In the 100 years from 1899 to 1999, CA had exactly 3 Democratic governors. (emphasis added)
In that time period California had 4 Democratic governors:
Culbert Olson
Pat Brown
Jerry Brown
Gray Davis
Proposition 98 passed in 1988 and as far as I can see it did not mandate a level of spending-- it said 60% of the budget must go to education. But let's put that aside and go to the CA Department of Finance "Chart B" which provides historical data on budget amounts (I would call it a "table" not a "chart"). Take the 1990 budget without federal transfers and expand it proportional to population growth and the US CPI to 2008. In current dollars, we get $106 billion. Thus post Prop 98, if California had simply kept spending in line with inflation and population growth, we would not have a budget problem.
Note also that California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994. That would have held down spending, but a federal judge found the proposition unconstitutional. Republican governor Wilson appealed, but Democrat governor Gray Davis dropped the appeal.
Sorry but I have to disagree with your narrative about the voters being responsible for the current CA spending excess. As I have shown above, it's the usual liberal elites that have driven the overspending.
Well, no. I was going from election to election. Starting from the 1899 election and going up to, but not including, the 1999 election is 100 years with 3 Dem governors.
Could the current Governor pick up the appeal to Prop 187?
Or would it have to pass again and start running through the ringamarole?
"Yeah, there's abuse in those areas, but the fact remains that police, fire and prisons are core functions of government which even libertarians support. I can't see how it's in anyone's interest to eliminate them."
Are you sure you want to be an apologist for the prison-industrial complex? How progressive is that?
Eliminate them? You've hardly even scratched them.
Not in the slightest. As I indicated in my response to DMN above, I have no sympathy for existing drug laws and I think we imprison far too many people. However, as I also said, those of us with this view are a clear minority. I think it's bad policy, but I also think that a majority gets to make decisions like that. I may not like the policy, but I respect the process.
Since your count critically depends on the time frame why would you eliminate the 1999 election? I get the idea that CA has had very few Democrats as governor, but you said exactly, as if somehow the precise count mattered. If we want to be precise then the 1999 elected governor belongs in the count, otherwise we are dealing with arbitrary time frames.
Mark - The more you write, the more it sounds like really, really bad flame and/or parody.
Leaving aside the arbitrary line you're drawing with respect to "the most important aspects of government", no current democrary is as simple a system as majority representative rule, even if only for the most important aspects. Heck, it took a constitutional amendment (which, in case you're wondering, wasn't passed by simply a majority of Congress) to even make federal income taxes legal. Even today, it takes more than a simple majority to pass a federal budget (given procedures like the filibuster).
That doesn't mean we don't live in a democracy - we're certainly not a pure republic, but you're the first person I've met in a long time who thinks that's a bad thing.
Well, 2/3 is a majority, no?
Do you live in California? Do you read the news? The Sacramento County sheriff's department is laying off something like 200 deputies. My own, smaller county is seeing comparable cuts in patrols and has closed half of the local jail. The governor proposes early release of some 20,000 (if memory serves) state inmates.
I've been a resident of California for 30 years, and I've become tired of the Governor and state legislators blaming their poor performance on the voters. I'll comment on a few of the things the politicians and pundits like to put the blame on.
(1) They love blaming Proposition 13. Prop. 13 limited increases in property taxes. Now, property taxes mostly affected local (city and county) revenues. Responsible local governments would have reacted to that by limiting the increases in spending. But instead, they made a bargain with the state government to give to the state some other local revenues, and they would supposedly get back from the state more money. The problem wasn't Proposition 13, it was the games the local and state govt. played to either not have to limit their spending increases or avoid increasing other local taxes.
(2) The 2/3 supermajority to pass a budget has been in place since the 1930s, yet passing budgets has only been a problem for the last 5-10 years. So I don't buy the claim that it is a major cause of the situation.
(3) Proposition 98 mandated that 40% of the budget must go to K-12 education. As others have pointed out, this mandates only what slice of the budget pie goes to education, not the total spending. I didn't like it and voted against it, but it doesn't force an absolute level of spending. Also, this passed in 1998, and again, the big deficits are a recent phenomenon.
(4) Most of the other initiative mandated spending are bond issues, which are kind of self financing, but they do impact the general state budget by increasing how much of it must go to paying interest on that debt. But other than that the spending on those things does not continue after those bonds are paid off. Other programs have been self financing (tobacco taxes are popular for that), and these programs usually run surpluses, in fact the recent Propositions C and D tried to raid those funds.
(5) The 2/3 supermajority requirement makes it harder to raise taxes. I guess whether this is a good thing or not depends on your philosophy of government. I think it is a very good thing, and again, the legislators are aware of this bound on their actions, and can react accordingly.
For whatever reason, (IMO a combination of pork for constituents and servicing special interests), the CA. state government has refused to live within the limits the voters have tried to put on it. Several analysis have pointed out that if spending had been limited to population growth and inflation there would be no deficit.
Many claim the state is ungovernable. My contention is rather that the state government is uncontrollable.
And now, that disfunction is about to be loaded onto the backs of the rest of the country, as Obama hands them freshly printed cash to alleviate their self induced problems.
Not to mention, the $1/2B he provided Feinstein's buddies for that car company nobody ever heard of out there... you know, a brand new company which suddenly needs to be bailed out alongside the Big 3.
Brilliant idea... find out which industry it targeted for the next round of bailouts, do a start up, and rake in the cash. Fuqqin brilliant.
Sure, unemployment payments and food stamps should go up in a recession, but that is a small part of the expansion of state and federal spending. The complicated tax structure makes revenue volatile and hard to predict (or easy to manipulate).
The discretionary budgets are often the most fundamental government spending but are handed the leftovers.
For those who think prop 13 is the source of the problems, what kind of budget would California have now without it. They would only have run up larger deficits.
Because it made a nice round 100 years. And because those years encompassed essentially the entirety of the 20th C.
You can't leave that aside, that's the whole point. The principle of majority rule is an essential component of republican government. I've agreed there are limits to majority rule, but if the system doesn't run generally by majority vote, then it's no longer a republic.
It amazes me, though I guess it shouldn't (Kerr's Law), that on a board where people scream to high heaven about the undemocratic nature of the judiciary when it rules on gay marriage, the same posters will defend 2/3 rules for something as traditionally subject to majority rule as taxes and spending.
This is a grotesque exaggeration.
California's general fund expenditures are close to $95 billion. Of this amount, the only major portion mandated by initiative is K-12 education at ~40%.
The big ticket agency budgets after K-12 in the general fund are Health and Human Services(~30%),University education (~13%) and Corrections (~10%). Note that Corrections is ONLY the prison &parole system, and does _not_ include law enforcement generally.
Note that California is a real outlier compared to other states in the share of its budget devoted to subsidizing higher education and financing its prison system. Its like the state is determined to provide every young man in California with the choice of spending years of his life in college or incarcerated, with no in-between.
And anyone arguing that initiative mandates are the true source of CAs budget issues is by necessity implicitly arguing that K-12 spending is relatively overfunded in the state, and ought to bear a disproportionate share of any spending cuts. Do you see any politicians in the legislature willing to actually make that argument explicitly? Probably not.
2/3 is a majority.
"Do you live in California? Do you read the news? The Sacramento County sheriff's department is laying off something like 200 deputies. My own, smaller county is seeing comparable cuts in patrols and has closed half of the local jail. The governor proposes early release of some 20,000 (if memory serves) state inmates."
No, I live in Ohio, and the local law enforcement bureaucracy is shooting out the same self-preserving inkcloud as bureaucracies perpetually do - holding the most popular and vulnerable hostage to preserve their prerogatives. One would think that closing some jails would be an opportunity to focus on detaining the most dangerous criminals, but so far here, no dice on that matter. Notice the 200 deputies. Where are those to whom they were deputized?
My local school board likewise is RIFing the youngest and most promising teachers, while leaving mediocre mid-50's double-dippers raking in three times the cash flow untouched, thanks to local union contract stipulations. The NEA: about as progressive as Tony Soprano.
Wagner and Ponzi and Davis and Bacon, oh my!
Leaving aside the fact a 2/3s majority is still a majority, I don't think your assessment of things that are "traditionally subject to [simple] majority rule" is correct. It's not true at the federal level. It's not true in my home state of Illinois. I think you need to do a little more research before proclaiming that California is some kind of freakish outlier.
No, a 2/3 requirement amounts to minority rule -- 1/3 controls the rest.
When the governor and the legislature tried to solve the problem earlier this year, they put together a package of referenda which would, in part, have done just this. It was voted down.
Very deceptively played.
The total dedicated funds diverted to what were general funds items by 1D and 1E would have been $0.838 billion, a mere drop in the bucket. At the same time, 1B would have diverted $9.3 billion from the general fund to dedicated education spending.
To make up for that reduction of over $8 billion in funds available for general expenditures, the package allowed borrowing against future lottery revenue (that is, an exception to the balanced budget requirement), and higher taxes.
The Legislature's actions speak much louder than words; they don't think the problem is mandatory spending, they thing the problem is they can't tax-and-spend.
With a relative who moved to the US in the 60's and still to this day has never applied for citizenship because she's afraid she doesn't know the answers to the citizenship test and may fail it, having asked her what the three branches of government are to use an example of easy questions to expect, she didn't know the answer to any even after I told her what one was, and then told her the second. And then having asked the same question to others to see whether they knew the answer or get a handle on how ignorant or poorly educated they really are.
After the experiences I've run into with potential hires and actual employees, and then interacting with attorneys, judges,engineers, architects, IT administrators/systems analysts, physicians and many other professionals many of whom are ignorant at best or incompetent yet tolerated in their fields sometimes because their peers or superiors are either powerless to remove them/fire them or are ignorant or incompetent themselves and don't want to rock the boat...
...we have a very well known attorney that has worked on cases that have gone to the supreme court and promotes himself by running a blog where his opinions on how cases are going to turn out are often correct, and his analysis of current law issues is excellent, yet as a professional who wins or loses, who can be propelled to the top or who can be disbarred depending on his analysis, interpretation and definition in every word and the precise definition and intent of use of each of the words in his filings, arguments and interpretations of statutes, precedents and the decisions of judges and courts of law......and yet we have a blog post in which a local government argument over taxes (which he neglects to point out how the legislator obfuscates the word "tax" by using the word "revenue" instead) leads to what can only be seen as a claim (because of the link to the specific online dictionary definition) that we (or maybe just the citizens of California?) live in a democracy/democratic form of government. Since this isn't a court filing or work for a specific client that a state bar can claim was professional work as an attorney and therefore should be held to the professional standards of an attorney, perhaps the excuse of "I linked to it but didn't read their definition specifically" or, "the cms did it" would be acceptable. I think otherwise. With so many bloggers and public comments repeatedly making the mistake of claiming the U.S. is a democracy, or the U.S. has a democratic form of government, any attorney who also blogs must make it a point to correct this error by leading by example. It's a republic, not a democracy.
Even the pledge of allegiance gets this right. You remember that, the pledge of allegiance folks, right?
As to my spelling and grammar, as I pointed out, I'm a dumb college dropout, dumb American, angry white male still clinging to my guns and religion (well almost on the religion part) and it's nearly 4 am going into a three day holiday. I don't have time to correct my post, it's time to scrape off the plastic tips of the waterproof fuses, pack the powder, bottle the flammables and combustibles, and get the old zippo filled and flinted.
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