Davis vs. Davis

The governor who says he "kept the lights on" raises doubts about those in his own head.

"After three years in office and an easy primary win, Gov. Gray Davis faces a strange problem: More California voters than ever actively dislike him," reports the Los Angeles Times.

Can anyone blame them? Davis is doing an awfully good impression of Al Gore these days. Consider Davis's recent oddball interview with the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Before the board, the nerdy braggart fumed about California's energy crisis last year: "If I didn't panic, you wouldn't be able to put out your paper. I saved this friggin' paper. I kept the lights on in this state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on."

Davis added modestly that he thinks he deserves a "round of applause" for his management of the crisis. Those who have noted his dithering and fumbling don't "know squat," he said.

Davis displayed a level of defensiveness in the interview that would make a paranoiac proud. Referring to the criticism of his bungling of the crisis, he declared: "This is like a war. This is worse than being in Vietnam. This is a full-out war against me."

"I saved this friggin' paper," "Worse than being in Vietnam," - such delusional rantings suggest Davis is losing his political grip.

Perhaps Simon's best response to a lunging pol like Davis is simply to step back and let him stumble to the ground on his own.

Californians are smart enough to see past Davis's self-serving analysis of the electricity crisis. Many will recall that Davis did not keep the "lights on," but turned them off. Remember the Davis-decreed "rolling blackouts" - one of the more insane public policies in the annals of California governance?

Cars piled up and dialysis machines went dead as Davis randomly pulled the plug on the state's electricity. The Los Angeles Times featured a front page photo of children trapped in an elevator.

Davis calls this "crisis management"; Californians recall it as the panicking of a Jimmy Carter-style loser.

It appears that many Democrats apparently agree. The Times reports that "almost a third of Democratic respondents to a Times poll said they looked upon Davis unfavorably, as did almost two in five independents. Of those who said they disliked Davis, 42 percent cited the power crunch as the No. 1 reason, criticizing his approach and his results." "'He ignored everything for a year, then he did everything in secret,' said Dvorah Colker, a Los Angeles Democrat who voted for Davis in 1998 but said she will not do so again."

According to the Times, "roughly the same number of voters disapprove of Davis' job performance as approve - 47 percent in each case, anemic numbers for an incumbent."

The Simon campaign is just warming up and the Al Gore of California already runs scared.

I'm going to break one of my self-imposed rules and post an entire article verbatim. The reason I'm doing this is that it's likely to vanish with the next issue of the Malibu Times, and I think publisher Arnold York, author of the article, would like to see this information disseminated more widely. If I am wrong, I apologise to Mr York for intruding on his copyright.

The arrogance of power
Arnold G. York/Publisher

One of the things I learned in my years as a trial lawyer is that you never want to get the other side so worked up that they spend the entire weekend preparing for the resumption of the trial on Monday.

So it was always better to amble up to the other side on Friday afternoon and say something like, Can't we settle this piece of junk? They invariably laughed, went home confident and spent the weekend playing golf, figuring they had the case in the bag. It never failed.

Apparently, the California Coastal Commission never learned the simple lesson that it's not a good idea to get the opposition so worked up they'd stop at nothing. But that's what the Coastal Commission has done, repeatedly.

For example, there is currently a case on appeal in the California Court of Appeals called the Marine Forest Society vs. the California Coastal Commission in which the constitutionality of the Coastal Commission appointment process has been challenged. The gist of the challenge is that two-thirds of the voting Coastal Commission are appointed by the Legislature, and serve at the will of the Legislature, and that the arrangement violates the "Separation of Powers" clause of the state Constitution. This argument has been put forth for about 10 years by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which now represents the Marine Forest Society. This time, in this case, they found a judge who agreed and held the Coastal Commission as constituted unconstitutional. Needless to say, the Coastal Commission appealed the decision and it's now before the Court of Appeals and people are filing briefs.

If the Court of Appeals upholds the trial court's decision, the Coastal Commission, as we now know it, is probably gone, as it's unlikely a conservative California Supreme Court would come to the Coastal Commission's aid. The commission would then have to run to the Legislature to try and fix the situation. But there are many cities that would be considerably more skeptical this time around and I think a fix would not be that easy.

You would think, under the circumstances, the California Coastal Commission, having so much at stake in this lawsuit, would approach public controversy in a cautious manner, trying to avoid high-profile actions right now.

You might think so, but you'd be wrong. It's almost as if the Coastal Commission is going out of its way to provoke our city, and in the process scaring the heck out of a lot of other coastal cities that also see AB988 as an attack on their sovereignty.

Malibu, of course, has joined the Marine Forest Society lawsuit and filed an amicus brief, which says to the Court of Appeals that the city agrees and thinks the Coastal Commission is unconstitutional as constituted. And besides, the Legislature has given the Coastal Commission the power to write our land use plan, and there's nothing more legislative then writing a law that an executive agency like the Coastal Commission is not supposed to do.

Now this dispute between a governmental agency and a property rights group has widened to include a question of local powers and improper delegation of legislative powers to an executive agency. Of course, as the fight gets more press, other people will begin to file amicus briefs and the case will pick up public attention, which most certainly the justices are aware of.

Recently, a brief filed by attorney Michael Berger, a very highly regarded land-use lawyer, injected another issue-the Legislature retains the power to remove Coastal Commissioners at will, without cause. All it takes is a phone call. This is not just hypothetical. Apparently, Sen. Roberti did it on the issue of allowing oil drilling off Pacific Palisades, and pulled an appointment of his who disagreed with him. Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamonte did it when he became speaker and immediately yanked all the Republican appointments. So now the Court of Appeals knows this is more than just a theoretical argument about delegation of powers and is, in fact, a major battle about how our government works, which of course makes it a more difficult and important case.

The more hardball the Coastal Commission plays with us, the more we're going looking for allies to file amicus briefs and to bolster our side legally and politically.

The fight we're having is pretty symptomatic of what's wrong with the Coastal Commission. The commissioners really do believe they walk on water. They believe that they're the white hats and all the rest of us are the blacks hats. They believe that only they can save and protect the coast because we're all too greedy or too NIMBY or too selfish to care about anyone but ourselves.

Well, they're wrong. They don't have any special God-given insight into protecting the coast and there are lots of towns, like Malibu, and counties up and down the coast that can do the job just fine, without their help. Perhaps they've outlived their usefulness and maybe their time has come. Stay tuned.

---

There was a previous editorial about the Coastal Commission designating all of Malibu as an environmentally sensitive area, except one part, in Point Dume.

By an astonishing coincidence, one of the Coastal Commissioners happens to live in that very area.

All of Malibu is in an uproar over this because it has the potential for making much of the property in the city worthless or next to it. In a place where the average house costs $1,300,000, this is a big deal indeed.

It's worth noting, though, that the City of Malibu is known for being incredibly fractitious, as has been reported many times in the Malibu Times (from where this article comes). The City of Newport Beach has a local coastal plan approved, and apparently has relatively little trouble with the Coastal Commission. Malibu's government couldn't agree on a plan, so management of the city's environment winds up in the Coastal Commission.

To some extent, then, Malibu's problems are self-inflicted wounds. But that doesn't mean what the Coastal Commission is doing in response to the situation is fair, or right.

It's not.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.