The Spring 2006 issue of PolicyMatters is now available online for your viewing pleasure. You'll notice that the Current Issue icon on the right side of the screen now leads to the .pdf of the new issue. On the left side I've replaced the the table of contents to reflect the current slate of articles. I'll fix the titles in the next few days, so they link directly to individual articles.
Speaking of money in politics, the Sacramento Bee has an informative graphic spread today on the 3 major gubernatorial candidates, their war chest, and the sources of their funding. Interesting how Angelides is not far behind Arnold in the proportion of his funding from entertainment interests. It's also useful in that it illustrates the argument that self-funded candidates are less beholden to special interests (although notice how even millionaires like Schwarzenegger and Angelides are only willing to self-fund at most 20% of their respective campaigns).
Today, the California Nurses Association began collecting signatures to place a "clean elections" proposition on the November ballot. Were the initiative only about publicly-funding the campaigns of candidates without deep-pocketed friends, it might actually do the state some good; but instead, it tacks on even more stringent contribution limits to all candidates, whether they opt-in to the campaign finance scheme or not. Far from encouraging more grassroots candidates, the CNA's proposal would lead to even more of the very candidates they seek to avoid: millionaires.
Almost 10 years ago, Jonathan Rauch wrote a prescient article in National Journal entitled "Campaign Finance - Blow It Up." "Probably no American public policy," he said, "is a more comprehensive failure than campaign finance law." Rauch argued that, no matter what, money would find its way into politics like water, and that any attempt to hold the flood back would not only be futile, but would also lead to perverse results, among them higher-premiums on rich, self-funded candidates and shadowy organizations only nominally independent from the campaigns they supported. His solution was an all-or-nothing approach: give all candidates the option to either raise unlimited amounts of cash from whomever they wished with full and rapid disclosure, letting voters, not bureaucrats, judge propriety, or be freed almost entirely from the burdens of fundraising by fully funding their campaigns with public money.
The powerful California Nurses Association embraced one half of Rauch's idea on Monday and abjectly disposed of the other, beginning a petition drive Tuesday to place a "clean elections" law on the November 2006 ballot. Their proposal, called the "Clean Elections Campaign Reform Act" (CECRA), is a combination of introducing "full" public campaign financing for statewide candidates (funded by an increase in the corporate tax rate) and drastically lowering contribution limits to non-participating candidates. You can view the full-text here.
Here's how it would work: if you wished to opt-in, you'd need to raise contributions of $5 in numbers ranging from 750 for an Assembly candidate to 25,000 for a gubernatorial hopeful. Once certified, your public funding would likewise depend on what office you sought, and whether you were competing in a primary or a General election. Gubernatorial candidates, for example, would receive $10 million for the primary and $15 million for the General. As a point of reference, both Phil Angelides and Steve Westly had spent about $6 million each through March 17, with much, much more in their respective coffers. Independent and non-participant expenditures used against you that exceed these initial figures will be matched by the state.
Meanwhile, the Act would lower individual contribution limits to $500 for legislative candidates and $1000 for statewide offices. Again, as a point of reference, the current limit for the Governorship stands at $20,000. Contributions by lobbyists and contractors would be banned, though I can't imagine that either wouldn't find some loophole to exploit
So what's the problem? Well, there are several...
First, as Greg Kato already mentioned in his previous post about a similar proposal in the Assembly, this system holds major party candidates to a different standard than third-party candidates and independents. The latter would have to raise twice the number of donations (50,000 for Governor) to qualify, and even then would only receive half the funds their Republican or Democratic rivals get for the same office. Any serious attempt to foster "clean" campaigns and greater electoral participation needs to set a level playing field for candidates. Treat everyone equally, period.
The second fatal flaw is the qualifying threshold. Twenty-five thousand donations for a gubernatorial candidate strikes me as a bit much for a system that's supposed to encourage grassroots democracy, to say nothing of the 50,000 donations you'd have to solicit if there's not a "D" or an "R" after your name. Ten thousand sounds more reasonable. Anything higher would be insurmountable without significant logistical funding on the candidate's part, counter-productive considering that the system aims to attract exactly those candidates without such funding.
Speaking of which, lowering the contribution caps to $1,000 for a gubernatorial candidate is just going to place a even bigger premium on self-funded candidates like, say, this one. Or this one. Or even this one. Maybe that's the idea that the nurses had in mind: since almost no one could raise sufficient cash to run for Governor off of $1000-maxed donations, the limits would effectively whittle down the types of candidates to two: publicly-financed and completely self-financed, a backdoor route to the Rauchian ideal. Now, some argue the rich aren't quite the threat to the Republic they may at first seem; after all, a millionaire is beholden to no one but herself. I would add: herself... and the source of her millions, and therein lies the dilemma. Few took pause at Steve Westly dipping into his eBay fortune to fund his own campaign, but what if he had made his windfall working for, say, Enron, or Halliburton? Plus, what of those candidates ideologically-opposed to campaign finance? Doesn't CECRA effectively declare, "Libertarians need not run (unless they're loaded)" ?
I should also mention that CECRA has ideas I like: matching the spending of non-participants, for example, and tying all the monetary thresholds and limits to inflation and registered voters; but the attempt to steer most candidates toward public financing by starving other funding options will backfire, I fear, and lead to a plutocratic nightmare. Let's end the legal quagmire of campaign finance once and for all. Give viable candidates the public funding they need to be competitive, and get out of the anti-democratic business of over-regulating electoral behavior. Let the voters decide the propriety, or lack thereof, of each candidate. This solution may lack the policy theatrics of categorizing money sources and enforcing contribution limits, but as any victim of quick sand will tell you, sometimes the struggle makes the problem worse, even fatal.
My grandmother never learned to speak English, other than what was required for her citizenship test. After immigrating to the United States in her 30s, she spent most of her life in Chinatown, and then living in a senior housing complex with other Chinese people.
Because she only spoke Cantonese, my grandmother was never fully able to participate in society’s larger discourse. But she raised five children who did. Four of them went onto become public servants who spoke fluent English.
I wonder what my grandmother would have thought of the latest flap over ''Nuestro Himno,'' a Spanish-language version of the national anthem that was recently released by a British producer as part of the growing immigrants’ rights movement.
Adam Kidron, director of the record label Urban Box Office, wrote "Nuestro Himno," which is sung by artists including Gloria Trevi, Wyclef Jean, Pitbul, Olga Tañón and Carlos Ponce, Ivy Queen, Tito "El Bambino" and the band Aventura.
Conservatives have been quick to label this an insult, and proof of increasing cultural balkanization.
“I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English,'' President Bush said. ''And they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.''
Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles’s first Latino mayor since 1872, told CNN he was offended “because, for me, the national anthem is something that deserves to be respected. Without a doubt, the vast majority of the United States also took offense on that. Our national anthem must be sung in English, the Spanish and Mexican anthems in Spanish, the French one in French, so that's why I took offense.”
The debate over whether immigrants should be required to learn English is an old one, but this latest iteration is even more inflammatory because it lies at the intersection of patriotism and multiculturalism.
One can make a reasonable argument that people should learn English so that they have access to more opportunities and can more fully participate in our democracy. But too often, insisting that new arrivals learn English is an easy cover for immigrant bashers.
Demanding that the national anthem only be sung in English is short sighted. After all, don’t we want other cultures to understand ours?
Consider a recent, similar dispute over the Pledge of Allegiance. Thousands of Spanish speakers stood on Washington’s National Mall and recited the pledge from phonetic fliers at a recent immigrants’ rights march. While the phonetic pledge was touching, and a little odd – “Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg/Of d Yunaited Esteits of America,” it read – its readers likely had no idea what it meant. Isn’t it better for people to understand what they are pledging, or singing, particularly when it pertains to values fundamental to our nation?
The salad bowl and melting pot metaphors are unfortunate and simplistic devices for thinking about assimilation, though I am unable to come up with a better one. What I do know is that the different fragments of culture that immigrants bring to our country enrich it, and, combined, they are what make us uniquely American.
As Ralph E. Shaffer and Walter P. Coombs, professors emeriti at Cal Poly Pomona point out, performing the national anthem in a foreign language is nothing new. German and Latin translations appeared in the 1860s, followed by a Yiddish version, they note. The U.S. Bureau of Education printed it in Spanish in 1919. And you can find it in Spanish on the current State Department website.
A few years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came under fire for being a member of the advisory board of U.S. English, a group that wants to make English the official language of the United States.
Gabriela Lemus, who was then director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), told me then that Schwarzenegger's membership on the board of U.S. English "does not bode well for Hispanics. So many of us support bilingualism and bilingual education and maintaining our culture, and he's essentially saying it's not valid by being part of this board that has got this whole anti-immigrant, underlying racist mentality," Lemus said.
LULAC, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group, called on Schwarzenegger to resign from the board. He never did; his name is still listed on the group’s Web site, along with fellow board members Charlton Heston and Alex Trebek.
Insisting that people learn English has always been a political issue, but this time it seems particularly hypocritical, too. President Bush, who has often spoken Spanish to appeal to Latino voters, was the first president to give his weekly radio address in Spanish. (The Spanish wire service Agencia EFE once said he spoke the language poorly, ''but with great confidence,'' the New York Times reported.) Villaraigosa has also spoken Spanish on the campaign trail, and was successfully propelled to office last year by his ability to patch together a winning coalition of black, white and Latino voters.
More troubling than arguments over the national anthem, though, is an attempt by a group of House Republicans to do away with bilingual ballots and translation assistance at the polls. As Congress prepares to reauthorize the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the legislators are asking colleagues to let the act’s language assistance provisions expire.
I don’t know what my Cantonese-speaking grandmother would have made of this attempt to deprive citizens of their right to vote simply because they have not mastered English.
I do know, however, that she raised a son – my dad – who believes passionately in serving his country. He devoted his entire career to public service, beginning as the first Asian American in the Lane County, Ore. sheriff’s department, then going on to work for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Ten years ago, he retired from his job as an agent at the U.S. Department of Defense. Now, he works part time training local law enforcement recruits at a South Bay police academy. Not bad for the son of a Chinese immigrant who never learned to speak English.
