Joe Mathews: California, Ruined by the Supermajority
[Joe Mathews, a contributing writer for Opinion, is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the coauthor of "California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It."]
You don't need to know anything about electricity to understand what's wrong with Proposition 16, the initiative sponsored by the parent company of the Northern California utility PG&E, on the June 8 ballot. You only need to know California's tortured history with supermajorities....
The best known of these supermajorities are the two-thirds requirement to pass a budget, approved in a 1933 ballot measure, and Proposition 13's requirement of a two-thirds vote for a tax increase. California was the first state to have these dual supermajorities. And despite our role as a shaper of American style, technologies and trends, no state has followed our lead in this regard. Governmentally, California is the guy wearing green polka dots....
Setting democracy's bar higher than a simple majority vote can sound like a good idea; it was sold to Californians in 1933 as a way to encourage consensus and defeat partisanship. But the math just doesn't work out that way, a fact that our state has proved spectacularly. None of this would have surprised this country's founders. They considered, and rejected, proposals to require supermajority votes in Congress for budgets and ordinary legislation; instead they reserved two-thirds votes only for enormous actions of the state — the approval of of constitutional amendments, conviction in an impeachment trial, ratification of treaties and the override of a presidential veto.
In Federalist 58, James Madison condemned the supermajority for the power it would give to narrow interests. "An interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal," he warned, "or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences." 
The supermajority protection in Proposition 16 is another unreasonable indulgence — for a state that already has overindulged.
Read entire article at LA Times
You don't need to know anything about electricity to understand what's wrong with Proposition 16, the initiative sponsored by the parent company of the Northern California utility PG&E, on the June 8 ballot. You only need to know California's tortured history with supermajorities....
The best known of these supermajorities are the two-thirds requirement to pass a budget, approved in a 1933 ballot measure, and Proposition 13's requirement of a two-thirds vote for a tax increase. California was the first state to have these dual supermajorities. And despite our role as a shaper of American style, technologies and trends, no state has followed our lead in this regard. Governmentally, California is the guy wearing green polka dots....
Setting democracy's bar higher than a simple majority vote can sound like a good idea; it was sold to Californians in 1933 as a way to encourage consensus and defeat partisanship. But the math just doesn't work out that way, a fact that our state has proved spectacularly. None of this would have surprised this country's founders. They considered, and rejected, proposals to require supermajority votes in Congress for budgets and ordinary legislation; instead they reserved two-thirds votes only for enormous actions of the state — the approval of of constitutional amendments, conviction in an impeachment trial, ratification of treaties and the override of a presidential veto.
In Federalist 58, James Madison condemned the supermajority for the power it would give to narrow interests. "An interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal," he warned, "or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences." 
The supermajority protection in Proposition 16 is another unreasonable indulgence — for a state that already has overindulged.