KQED Radio's John Myers provides a handy list of nine story lines Californians should watch as the 2010 political season begins.
The one part of the story that shall drive many of the others, of course, is the 2/3-vote hypermajority required to pass a budget. A requirement allowing Republicans to have veto power over the state budget even though they hold fewer than 40 percent of the seats in Sacramento.
Actually, if it were just veto power over the state budget, that would be bad enough. But it's more. As Myers writes:
Democrats decry the two-thirds mandate as an invitation for legislative extortion from the GOP legislators who they must cajole; Republicans defend it as the only way they ever get their issues heard in a statehouse where Dems often seem to dismiss GOP proposals out of hand.
You know, there is another way the GOP could get its proposals seriously heard in Sacramento.
Hmmm....what was that again? It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, how about winning some elections?
The hypermajority requirements ensure our government cannot function and cannot solve problems. For the radical anti-government factions within the GOP, isn't that a feature and not a bug?
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