When voters passed a union-backed measure last year to reduce the legislative vote on the state budget from two-thirds to a simple majority – thereby eliminating Republican leverage – skeptics said it could foster legislative mischief.

Proposition 25 applied not only to the budget but "trailer bills" that the Legislature deemed necessary to implement the budget. And all budget bills would take effect immediately with a governor's signature, making any challenge via referendum legally doubtful.

That legislative loophole, this column and other analysts pointed out, would make it easy to push major pieces of policy legislation through the Capitol with little or no public notice. And that's exactly what has happened.

The last piece of the Democrats' June 28 budget package, placed before legislators only minutes before the vote, revised school finance to benefit the California Teachers Association and make it more difficult for school districts to manage cuts in state school aid.

Democrats were so proud of their newly minted budget hegemony that they did it again Monday by drafting and quickly pushing through the Assembly another major trailer bill with no hearings and virtually no notice. This one gathers idle funds from the state's two major university systems into a special pot from which the state could borrow for cash flow purposes.

There was no rational reason for the bill to be done so secretly or hurriedly. Seemingly, Democrats did it just because they could – thumbing their noses not only at Republicans but at the larger public.

But on the same day the college funds bill suddenly surfaced, another incident illustrated how the two-thirds vote can impede hasty decision-making.

Democrats (and a few Republicans) drafted a constitutional amendment that would allow either of two unelected state officials, the governor's finance director or the Legislature's budget analyst, to block any initiative measure they deemed to increase state or local government costs by more than $5 million, unless it had offsetting revenues or savings.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 6 would be a huge change in the state's century-old initiative system, sharply reducing the ability of outside groups to change state policy.

The system probably needs an overhaul because it has evolved from a safety valve into the state's basic public policy tool, but whether ACA 6 is real reform of ballot box budgeting or an anti-democracy power grab is debatable.

Constitutional amendments require two-thirds legislative votes, and Republicans refused to accept ACA 6 as written, forcing Democrats to take the state finance director out and also exempt tax-cutting measures from its provisions.

Whether ACA 6 is good public policy is still debatable, but at least it can't be jammed through the Capitol like those budget bills.

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Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/ walters.

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