I just want these very modest policy changes for Christmas
It's Christmas.
Depending on your worldview, this is either a day for celebrating the birth of the savior of humanity or eating Chinese food and watching “Die Hard.”
Do your thing.
Today is also the culmination of a month of being asked what I would like for Christmas.
My wish for $1 million in mixed bills will probably not be fulfilled. But maybe, just maybe, my wish to see certain policy changes will be realized someday in the state of California.
1) School choice in K-12 education
Despite throwing around tens of thousands per student per year, California consistently ranks at or near the bottom in national standardized tests compared to the rest of the country. Yes, even compared to the so-called flyover states that coastal elitists look down on.
And as I feel like I've written at least 100 times in my journalism career, even by the state's own standards, majorities of Black, Latino, Indigenous and low-income kids fail to meet the state's own standards on English and mathematics.
It's a reality that belies the babbling by leftwing politicians and pundits that they actually care about the well-being of poor and minority communities.
The status quo isn't working in California. The status quo is one controlled and dictated by the California Teachers Association and its minion unions across the state that fight any mechanism for accountability and reform.
“On the issue of tax-funded vouchers, 60% of adults and slightly more public school parents — 66% — favor providing them to parents for use at any public, private, or parochial school,” reported the Public Policy Institute of California in 2017. Even larger majorities of Black (73%) and Latino (69%) support vouchers.
It's time to honor the wishes of majorities of Californians and offer parents, students and teachers and give them the freedom to choose. Want to go to a traditional government school? Fine. Charter school? Fine. Religious school? Fine. This should be up to parents, not the government.
In allowing school choice, the grip of self-centered unions blocking tenure reform, merit-based pay and other means of achieving better outcomes for kids will finally be loosened.
2) CEQA reform
There are multiple contributing factors to California's high housing costs — from labor mandates to a litany of land-use restrictions — but I won't get greedy. It's Christmas, after all.
Gov. Jerry Brown once called reform of the California Environmental Quality Act “the Lord's work.” In recent years the California Legislature has approved CEQA exemptions for certain types of projects.
There's a reason for that. The 1970 law, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan, requires environmental impact reports and mitigation efforts for developments in the state. That's all well and good, but administration of the law itself can be quite cumbersome and it can be abused by NIMBYs to slow or stop projects.
The law firm Holland & Knight produced a report this year finding that, while California has seen just about 111,000 homes built per year in recent years, CEQA lawsuits targeted about 48,000 units in 2020 alone.
If California is going to build enough homes to support a growing economy, to give non-homeowners a chance at homeownership and keep more people out of homelessness, it needs to reduce arbitrary barriers to housing development.
California can have CEQA on the books while also making it less stifling.
For specific reforms, Baruch Feigenbaum at the Reason Foundation has suggested exempting all housing developments from the law, limiting statutory changes to CEQA so it's not a constant headache keeping up with ever-changing CEQA requirements and raising the bar for who can file a CEQA lawsuit.
Holland & Knight in 2015 proposed the following changes:
“1. Require those filing CEQA lawsuits to disclose their identity and environmental (or non-environmental) interests.
“2. Eliminate duplicative lawsuits aimed at derailing plans and projects that have already completed the CEQA process.
“3. Preserve CEQA's existing environmental review and public comment requirements, as well as access to litigation remedies for environmental purposes — but restrict judicial invalidation of project approvals to those projects that would harm public health, destroy irreplaceable tribal resources or threaten the ecology.”
Those all seem reasonable to me.
3) Decriminalization, legalization of victimless vices
Call me crazy — I'm sure by now some of you have — but I believe in the notion of self-ownership and the value of personal autonomy.
“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property,” wrote American philosopher Lysander Spooner in 1875. “Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.”
The heavy hand of the state should only come down on actual crimes, not mere vices.
If someone is using drugs and committing crimes to support that habit, the person should be held accountable for the actual crimes committed — theft, sale of stolen property, damage to property, fraud and so on. But the mere possession and use of drugs? That's just a vice.
If consenting adults are engaged in prostitution free from coercion, it may or may not be a moral or responsibility activity, but there's no reason for it to involve cops, courts and jails.
If an adult wants to bet on a sports game, they shouldn't have to go to Eastern European betting sites or Vegas or reservations, they should be able to do it without government interference.
On all of these vices, California has some carve-outs and sorta-steps in the right direction.
Drug possession is a misdemeanor thanks to Proposition 47. Critics complain Prop. 47 has “decriminalized” drugs. That's technically not true, but I fully support making that complaint a reality and repealing the misdemeanor status of drug possession. If addicts are causing enough problems to come on the radar of police, there are probably other crimes involved that can be leveraged to hold the person accountable and get them in treatment.
On prostitution, there's nothing stopping California from decriminalizing it. Before I go further, I'll address the rebuttal stewing in the minds of some readers: What I'm saying should be decriminalized is consensual activity between consenting adults. If trafficking, coercion, threats, minors and so on are involved, then, no, that's definitionally contrary to “consensual activity between consenting adults.”
This year, California approved Senate Bill 357, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which repealed “loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution” as a crime. That's something, but it just dances around the matter at hand. The state should at least study alternatives to criminalization, from decriminalization to legalization.
And then there's gambling. This November, Californians rejected Propositions 26 and 27 to legalize sports betting on reservations and online. Admittedly, both were convoluted and bad lawmaking, though Prop. 27, which would have allowed mobile sports betting, was the better proposal, because it would've given consumers more options. Meanwhile, most states, even lefty Massachusetts, New York and Oregon have legalized sports betting.
It's time for California to do the same. Here, the fight isn't really about any of the moral issues (people are more puritanical about sex and drugs than gambling) but over who gets to make the most money from a legal sports betting market in California — the tribes or gaming app companies. I say: legalize both and let consumers decide who makes the most money. Duh.
Which is most likely?
If I had to bet, there's probably a reasonable chance for decriminalization of some drugs to happen. Sen. Wiener has reintroduced legislation to decriminalize certain plant-based psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms. There's no logical reason to decriminalize ibogaine but not LSD. There are political reasons to do so, though. Because this is California, “plant-based” just goes down better here, I guess.
I suspect there will probably also be some more tiptoeing around CEQA reform, because even the most full-fledged partisan hack legislator can recognize CEQA is routinely abused and needs fixing.
Gambling will remain a heavy lift because of the money involved — and specifically because big-money tribes want all of it. All of it. All. Of. It.
I could imagine progressive Sacramento lawmakers being open to rethinking restrictive sex work laws, but I can also imagine them conveniently never finding the perfect time to raise the point.
I'm less optimistic about the prospects for education reform emphasizing accountability and choice. The unions are constantly working on how to attack Proposition 13 — hint, they're just going to call it racist over and over again and hope that works to get it repealed — and Democratic lawmakers don't care about Black and Latino kids enough to take on the teachers unions. That's a fact.