As the Big 5 careen toward yet another bad budget deal that will leave California even worse off than before, it's worth recognizing that despite the individual failures of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger - and let's face it, his failure is massive - California's crisis is a crisis of a broken governmental system.

For the last 30 years we have lived under a right-wing constitution. Prop 13 imposed a conservative system of government on California, where the state's tax revenues were set to an artificially low level and both the legislature and the people were denied the right to change this through a majoritarian process. As Congressman Sam Farr (CA-17) put it:

We can go to war on a simple majority vote. We can take away life and property with a simple majority vote. If it’s worked for 200 years for a nation, why does it have to be different for California?

The reason it is different is because conservatives are not a majority in the legislature or the population of California, haven't been for a VERY long time (if ever), and aren't going to be anytime in the foreseeable future. So they set up a system that is built to ensure they and their ideological desires are given priority. And it's working out pretty well for them.

Which means that for the rest of us, it's time to get to work changing that system. We've been kicking around the Constitutional Convention for a little while now on Calitics, but we need to bring this out to a wider audience. And that's what's going to happen in Southern California this weekend, with two town hall events on the Constitutional Convention.

The first is in Santa Monica on Friday night from 6-9pm at Santa Monica College. The second, co-sponsored by the Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) along with the Bay Area Council and the William C. Velasquez Institute, is at USC on Saturday from 9am to 3:30pm. Rick Jacobs, chair of the Courage Campaign, will be moderating the morning session on the problems with California's government. Panelists will include Assemblymember Kevin DeLeon, LA City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, Common Cause's Kathay Feng, and Dr. Jose Calderon of Pitzer College.

For those of you Northern Californians who don't want to spend your weekend in LA, I will be speaking on a panel "Business vs. the California State Constitution" at the CDP E-Board meeting in Burlingame at 8am on Saturday morning. Joining me will be Senator Loni Hancock, Roger Noll of Stanford University, and Sunne Wright McPeak of California Forward.

California Democrats have been excessively lazy in attending to California's finances and the state of our democracy. What they should have been doing all these years is building a campaign for basic reforms such as 50% vote being sufficient to raise taxes, splitting the Prop 13 tax rolls so that business pays its fair share, and perhaps most important creating a system for elections where opponents are more closely matched and the outcome of elections can no longer be so easily predicted, because when most of the outcomes are predictable, there is no real democracy and no real elections. Hopefully Prop 11 will take care of electoral reform, but without the people pushing for all they're worth, there will be no reform.