CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-Here’s an unfortunate example of “indirect democracy” coming up on California’s November 6 ballot: Proposition 7, which asks voters to approve permanent daylight saving time.
This is one of 12 Propositions placed before the voters, most of which deal with critical issues. In addition, the electorate is being asked to make decisions about important Federal and statewide offices as well as local issues. Lost in the fine print of this frivolous proposition is that only the Federal government can make that change to our clocks so, no matter the outcome of the vote, nothing will happen until Congress says so. Granting California permanent daylight savings time, hopefully, will not be a front burner item for our national government until they solve some of the bigger issues we face as a country.
How does this sort of political waste happen? The Attorney General and Secretary of State of California must dedicate lots of state workers’ time getting this proposition ready to include on the November 6 ballot. The issue did not arise because people demanded to put it on the November 6 ballot -- the traditional way of expressing “direct democracy” California is so famous for.
Instead, the DST ballot initiative didn't take much more than one State elected official, Assemblyman Kansen Chu (D-25-San Jose) to get 62 votes from a simple majority of the State Assembly and State Senate to send this bill on to the Governor for signature. His Sacramento colleague, State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-19-Santa Barbara) drilled down directly to the proposition’s lack of seriousness by saying, “with so many critical issues facing this state — housing, healthcare, the gas tax — to dive into the pros and cons of this diminishes the importance of more substantive ballot measures."
The question is why did Chu introduce this bill? In his own words, he described daylight saving time (DST) as “an outdated practice of switching our clocks in the fall and spring." He also said, “... voters will get to decide whether or not to eliminate the practice of switching our clocks twice a year. We started this practice to conserve energy during wartime, but studies show that this is no longer the case. We are no longer saving energy, and studies have shown this practice increases risk of heart attacks, traffic accidents and crimes. It is time that we as a state reconsider whether this is still beneficial to our residents.”
What bill sponsor Chu is giving us in AB 807 (Permanent Daylight Saving Time) is the chance to stop changing our clocks twice a year. Period.
What he is taking away from us is direct democracy. California is famous for its citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives that begin with the process of have having tens of thousands of Californians sign petitions asking for certain issues to be placed on the ballot for an up or down vote.
What Assemblyman Chu has given us to vote for is something that, so far, a minuscule fraction of California’s 18.8 million registered voters want. Instead of using the traditional “direct democracy” form of the Initiative Statute, Chu has used a “Legislative Statute,” which is a bill that has been passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the Governor. Jerry Brown, Governor of our light-filled Golden State (Florida is officially the “Sunshine State”) added to his signature the postscript of “fiat lux!” -- meaning “let there be light.”
What is flawed with Chu’s process is that it’s drip-down democracy: 62 legislators have put a proposition on the ballot -- technically an Initiative Statute that, if it had been sponsored by the public, would have required the signatures of 365,880 of the state’s 18.8 million registered voters. That’s equal to at least 5% of the total votes cast for Governor in the last gubernatorial election -- a far cry from this clutch of legislators shoving the proposition onto the ballot. Getting the required number of signatures from registered voters would have allowed for a broad vetting of the proposal by the public before facing review by the Attorney General and Secretary of State.
How effective has the initiative process, now subverted by Chu, been in the past? Since 1911, when California introduced it, the state has used the initiative process 364 times – and in 123 (24%) of those instances the initiative was approved by voters, leading to 52 times that the California Constitution itself has been amended through the state's initiative process.
That’s a pretty fair record for the success of direct democracy, negating the need or value of the drip-down democracy we see with Chu’s AB 807. Over more than a century, Californians have proved they can retain the integrity of this process and preserve our version of the ancient Greek “agora.”
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appear in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
