Hugh Hewitt: No more time for California dreamin'

Hugh Hewitt: No more time for California dreamin' Washington Examiner

This was going to be the year that California put its political and fiscal houses in order. In Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the state GOP had nominated two well-qualified candidates who were also well-funded and disciplined. The national political climate was favorable, and the state is teetering on the brink of a fiscal collapse.

Fiorina lost by more than 9 percent and Whitman by close to 12 percent to Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, respectively.

Explanations are more plentiful than roses on Jan. 1, but the short answer is that California's public employee unions play to win -- and they do. The secular tithe extracted from the paychecks of the state's more than 350,000 government employees is expertly banked and deployed against any enemy, real or perceived, of the state's public-sector bosses.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's now famous glass jaw was revealed when, after the drubbing the unions gave him in a special election over crucial ballot reforms in November 2005, he rolled up into a big green ball and spent the balance of his tenure in office extolling the virtues of deindustrialization under the moniker "green jobs." At the time of his beat-down, Arnold complained that no one could win a ballot race in the face of $160 million in negative advertising.

He was right, of course, and even though Whitman dug deep into her own fortune to try to match the unions, their infrastructure and ever plentiful treasury overwhelmed even that effort. Fiorina went down under the same avalanche of negative ads. A blue state went deep blue even as the rest of the country went decisively red.

Redistricting reform will fundamentally change the congressional politics of California in 2012 and beyond, but only the looming bankruptcy of the state may change the statewide lock of the unions. There just isn't any more money, and state voters on Tuesday shut the door on destructive tax hikes by installing a two-thirds approval requirement in the legislature on any new tax or fee increase. The state has a shortfall of hundreds of millions in the pension fund and already state vendors are long overdue routine payments. The state's bond rating is already downgraded from the glory years, with plenty of opportunity to fall further. Businesses and high income-earning individuals are fleeing -- and that exodus will increase.

The new Congress will hear pleas for help, but why will representatives of states with responsible governments approve a bailout for California and other profligate, government-employee dominated states like New York and Maryland? The U.S. isn't the EU, and Texas won't play Germany to California's Greece.

The one tool the new GOP majority in the House ought to propose to the Democrats in the Senate is a state version of bankruptcy: power to void the impossible-to-meet contracts with the public employee unions and other state undertakings made to special interests. This ought not to be a jam-down of a solution, but a proffer of an approach.

And there is a small chance -- a very, very small chance -- that Jerry Brown, at the end of his career and recognizing his legacy is on the line in the next 12 months, will pull a Nixon-to-China and force the unions that elected him to yield for the state's long-term good -- and their own.

That's a fantasy of course, and a happy ending for which there is no evidence.

But it is California. The state is full of dreamers. They voted their dreams on Tuesday, but the rent and the car payment are due now.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com

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