Terry Eastland
Progressive reform could end up limiting government
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | On Oct. 7, California voters will decide two questions. The first is whether Gov. Gray Davis, re-elected a year ago to a second term, should be removed from office. The second is who should replace him, if a majority votes for his removal. Whoever gets the most votes — and a plurality suffices — would become governor. And then? Who knows? But it would be ironic if a progressive reform — the recall — eventually led to more limited government. Ironic but laudable.
Progressivism was the national reform movement of the early 20th century that sought to check the influence of the railroads and other emerging corporate powers. Its leaders pushed for (among other things) measures of direct democracy to ensure that the will of the people — whom they assumed would demand regulation of the corporations — prevailed. Those measures included the initiative and the referendum — and also the recall of elected officers, which, it was theorized, would be used to remove corrupt officers, such as those in the pockets of big business.
California's most famous Progressive was Hiram Johnson, a Republican who served first as governor and then as a U.S. senator. Under Mr. Johnson's prodding, California amended its constitution to include a recall provision in 1911.
Seventeen states now have the recall, but getting a recall on the ballot may be easier in California than elsewhere. Even so, the Initiative and Referendum Institute reports 117 petition attempts in California, only seven of which have resulted in a recall election. But in four of the seven elections, the officer was removed. Never has a California governor been subject to a recall election, notwithstanding more than 30 petition efforts. Only one state — North Dakota in 1921 — actually has recalled one of its governors.
So, it would be remarkable if Mr. Davis were removed from office. The many reasons Californians give for wanting him out include his notoriously negative campaign style. But the core of the case against him concerns the state's fiscal decay.
Last year, for the first time since such records were kept, more people left California than came to it from other states. People are moving because jobs are scarce. Indeed, California lost more jobs last month than did all of the other 49 states combined. Business isn't tempted to expand in or to California, which has the lowest credit rating in the nation. Meanwhile, taxes have climbed higher and higher. So has state spending. Two years ago, the state had a $14 billion budget surplus; this year, it has a $38 billion deficit.
The complaint against Mr. Davis is that he not only has failed to arrest the state's fiscal decay but has contributed to it. Mr. Davis generally accepts what a free-spending Democratic legislature wants even as he accedes to the demands of the public employee unions, which reward him with their support. Last year, he approved a 33 percent pay raise for prison guards, whose union thanked him with a large campaign contribution.
Ironies abound in the recall story. Consider that Democrats are the ideological heirs of the Progressives, and yet the recall targets a Democrat who presides over a government made large over the years by its faithful response to the people's demands. Consider, too, that the Republican Party initiated the recall of Mr. Davis, and yet its intellectual allies have long warned against the dangers of direct democracy.
In the case of the recall, they have warned that its initial, successful use against a governor might lead to its use against the governor of the opposite party — and then continued partisan use after that. The concern is that the recall would induce timidity in the executive when energy and statesmanship are needed. In California, the executive isn't a constitutionally strong office.
Still, those concerns have yielded to the desire to use an available instrument and evict Mr. Davis. The instrument is being wielded not against corporate power, as the Progressives imagined, for that isn't the problem in California, but against a big government that is manifestly a bad government.
"The present recall effort," writes Glenn Ellmers of California's Claremont
Institute, "could have the paradoxical effect of prompting new debate
about the purpose and limits of government." And indeed it could,
especially if the voters elect a governor committed to using the line-item
veto and standing athwart the unions and other interests whose
demands inevitably must be paid for by the taxpayers of the state. In 60
days, we will have a better idea about California's future.
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JWR contributor Terry Eastland is is publisher of The Weekly Standard.Comment by clicking here.
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