Public Financing Is Clean Money : Revive Proposition 68 to cleanse Sacramento

California workers’-compensation law has been, over the years, an extraordinary drain on the state’s taxpayers. The law was badly drafted. This much everyone would admit. Only some knew that the law was badly drafted to a purpose and that those whose pockets it lined were paying handsomely to defend it from reform. Their agent was lobbyist Clayton R. Jackson. His method was influence-buying in the state Legislature.

On Wednesday, very belatedly, the law caught up with Jackson, who was convicted of, among other charges, offering former state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) $250,000 to move workers’ compensation legislation to a committee that Robbins, himself now convicted of corruption, then chaired.

Jackson’s lawyers have tried to defend their client by attacking Robbins, but the jurors insisted after the verdict that Robbins shocked them less than did their exposure to the routine corruption of a campaign contribution system in which large sums of money casually change hands in the patently disingenuous claim that no favors would ever be asked in exchange for the money. “We all felt the system caused the crime,” juror Robert Bartosh said.

Can the system be corrected? Down the street from the court where Jackson was convicted, another trial is taking place. Depending on its outcome, Californians may be able to begin defending themselves against deliberately bad laws that cost them millions and millions of dollars. Proposition 68, a 1988 campaign-reform initiative that sought to limit campaign contributions and spending and provide public financing of state legislative races, passed but came in second to Proposition 73, another reform bill. In 1990, the state Supreme Court ruled that only the bigger winner could take effect. Then, last year, a federal appeals court declared parts of Proposition 73 unconstitutional, leaving the state with no campaign reform law. The public-interest lobby Common Cause has sued to have Proposition 68 reinstated.

The reason why Proposition 73 got 58% of the vote in 1988 and Proposition 68 only 53% is that the latter provided for public financing of campaigns. That was an expense 47% of the voters were prepared to spare themselves; 53% thought, however, and this newspaper agrees with them, that the money saved by eliminating the kind of vote-buying of which Jackson has just been convicted would be vastly greater than the money lost in public campaign financing.

Precisely because lobbyists control so much in Sacramento, campaign reform via the legislative route is a perennial long shot. The voters have clearly chosen the reforms in Proposition 68. It remains to be seen whether the California Supreme Court will back them up.