With Election Day two weeks from Tuesday, I wanted to take the national pulse from California, where I just spent a few days. I know what you're thinking: California doesn't have a U.S. Senate election this year at the top of the ticket; Jerry Brown seems a shoo-in for re-election against Neel Kashkari, and California couldn't be more geographically removed from Washington. All true.
But there is often something afoot out west that merits the attention of the rest of the nation. Right now, there are several matters of interest.
Consider that Brown recently signed into law the nation's first state prohibition of plastic bags. In another first, family members cannot only seek a gun-violence restraining order, but they can also, after convincing a judge of an imminent threat, have the firearms of a relative seized, pending a hearing within 21 days. It also set a standard for campus sex, saying there must be an "affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision" by both parties before they can engage in sexual activity. And California just became the first state to ban public schools from suspending or expelling K-3 students for "willful defiance."
Each of these is the sort of initiative that causes many across the country to scratch their heads in wonderment, but often things that emanate from California don't stay contained there.
For example: No-fault divorce began in California. So, too, the decriminalization of pot. And one can only hope that there will soon be imitators of California's top-two, or "jungle," primary system, which forces candidates to moderate rather than just appeal to ideologues in hyperpartisan districts. California is also on the vanguard of professionalizing the drawing of legislative boundaries.
"I think one of the things that's interesting about California and makes it stand out is just simply the scale of the state," explained Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., the dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a professor of public policy and political science, with whom I spoke last week. "So when these kinds of changes happen in South Dakota or Oregon, it's not quite as significant, but when it happens in the most populous state, and happens at scale, then I think we stand up and take notice."
Gilliam put California's role in national politics in historical context:
"If you go back to the turn of the 20th century, you'll see that the progressive tradition starts there with Hiram Johnson and his attempt to break up the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railroad. So, for example, then Leland Stanford — who we know started Stanford University and who had been a co-founder of Southern Pacific — had been governor, he appointed the co-founder's brother-in-law to the Supreme Court and it just so happens that the brother-in-law was the chief counsel for Southern Pacific. So it was in response to this kind of robber-baron corruption that the progressive movement starts in California, and really at the turn of the 20th century, when direct democracy started."
