Opinion: In today’s pages: Supermajority, auto bailout and the oughts
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The Times editorial board, after many years of skepticism about California’s rule that state budgets can only be passed by a two-thirds vote, finally pulls the trigger and says the supermajority should be abolished. The current budget meltdown has made it abundantly clear that the state simply can’t function with a supermajority requirement shared only by Arkansas and Rhode Island, vastly smaller states. Without the two-thirds rule:
California would have a balanced budget. It also would have higher taxes, but taxpayers could rebel, as they have shown themselves willing to do. They could vote Republicans in, and it would be the new minority -- Democrats -- who insist on a supermajority rule. They shouldn’t have it, just as Republicans shouldn’t have it now. Minority rights should be protected, but vesting the minority party with the power to dictate to the majority isn’t protection, it’s subversion.
The Times also says the Bush administration did the right thing by extending a $13.4-billlion aid package to GM and Chrysler, but it has one piece missing: a way to restore Detroit’s ability to innovate and improve faster than its competition while also designing models that are more compelling.
Over on the op-ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg ponders whether this decade -- the oughts? -- has any meaning or theme, and if so, what it was. James Wagner, an editorial-pages staffer, describes the best Christmas present he ever got: The release of his father, who was taken hostage by Peruvian terrorists when James was 10. And Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson, authors of ‘The Money Trail: Finding, Following and Freezing Terrorist Finances,’ outline the reasons it’s so important to target Al Qaeda’s financial network and starve the organization of funds.