“Californy” continues to spiral into an abyss of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest is now the line item of every legislator in Sacramento content to “hillbillyify” our soon-to-be gap-toothed state.
The budget meltdown shows California is in dire need of a constitutional root canal; one that starts by extracting power from the revenuers and carpetbaggers who have created the current financial debacle.
Any lawmaker who has failed to fight tooth-and-nail to protect vital health services for the most vulnerable should have their molars ripped out of the sockets — without anesthesia. Beginning yesterday dental and other health care was denied to millions of California’s poor, aged and disabled.
A Superior Court judge in Sacramento last week didn’t stop at allowing lawmakers to cut Denti-Cal, the program that provides dental care for poor adults; Judge Timothy Frawley also said the Legislature was “within its rights” to cut programs like podiatry, psychology, speech therapy and optometry.
The pain doesn’t stop there. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to end Healthy Families, a program that provides medical care for nearly a million needy children. This is akin to murder, or in our case, “capitol” punishment.
Schwarzenegger is demanding draconian cuts that will end welfare, close state parks and cease road repairs. He has puffed up his chest and said he would veto anything short of his all-or-nothing demands to slash education, state worker pay, retirement pensions and future benefits.
Let’s summarize the looming cuts in one lengthy, sarcastic tirade: We’ll be the undereducated, unemployed American population watching disabled old people with no teeth and poor vision hobbling across run-down roads on sore feet until mental distress prompts them to jump off the nearest high rise outhouse.
The governor is not solely complicit in perpetuating this backwoods thinking. He has many accomplices in Sacramento, Republican and Democrat alike. This is without question a bureaucracy run amok. People no longer matter because each party is “negotiating” with absolutes and bandying pessimistic superlatives like “never.”
By not reaching a compromise at midnight Wednesday to close the $24 billion deficit, they turned it into a $26.3 billion dearth.
Because a two-thirds legislative majority is required to pass any budget, every resident is at the mercy of the six-figure-salaried yokels running the Golden State. We must seriously embrace either rewriting the state’s Constitution, or face the inevitability of widespread civil unrest and wanton street violence. These boneheads are on the precipice of turning urban centers into bloodbaths.
It’s time for a constitutional convention, possibly the only thing the Daily Forty-Niner and Conan agree upon.
Our current state Constitution is the third longest, and possibly the most complicated, in the world, trailing only India and Alabama. The document, written in 1849 primarily to protect Gold Rush special interest investors, has only had one rewrite, but has been amended more than 500 times.
Each time it gets amended, the old crap remains and new crap gets piled on top — accumulating 130 years of crap. If you consider that the U.S. Constitution has only been amended 27 times, California’s Constitution is more painful to “figger out” than using pine cones as toilet paper.
Ironically, before we could hold a constitutional convention, we would have to pass two state initiatives on the November ballot — one to authorize voters to “directly” call for a convention and a second to allow us to “actually” call for a convention.
That’s like deciding we must have a meeting to determine we must have a meeting, isn’t it?
How screwed are we if the dysfunctional Legislature that needs a two-thirds vote to pass a budget is the same Podunk assemblage required to call a convention to fix our broken charter? The Capitol Report on the Sacramento Bee’s Web site put it eloquently on Tuesday with, “Fundraising continues as usual.”
If we don’t mend the voluminous outdated state charter, smiles in our state will be both rare and ugly for generations to come.
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