Attorney General Jerry Brown made noises like a 19th-century states' rights zealot last week in opposing a looming federal court order requiring the state to spend up to $8 billion to improve health care in its much-overcrowded prison system.
As Brown depicted it in his appellate filing opposing the order obtained by federal receiver Clark Kelso, the order violates a federal law barring courts from ordering states to build new prisons as well as constitutional guarantees of state sovereignty.
"In ordering the state to fund the receiver's massive prison construction program, the district court clearly violated federal law, and its decision must be reversed," Brown told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, adding that the order is "particularly unacceptable at a time when California is facing a $25 billion deficit" and that the state had already acknowledged its prison health care problem and moved vigorously to solve it.
There was a nice bit of irony attached to Brown's effort to block judicial interference in California's prisons – the fact that he's been doing much the same thing vis-à-vis local governments and their land-use decisions.
Last year, after Assembly Bill 32, the state's landmark anti-greenhouse gas law, went into effect, a newly elected Brown took it upon himself to begin suing, or threatening to sue, cities and counties that didn't alter their local housing and land use plans to suit his vision of "elegant density" that would reduce auto traffic and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Brown acted even though the California Air Resources Board had not yet decided how land use would fit into its overall plan for reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, so the only authority was his own assumption. And in fact the CARB plan places little emphasis on housing.
Laws governing prison health care are clearer than those affecting local land-use decisions. When the state locks someone behind bars, it becomes, in effect, the inmate's parent, responsible for feeding, clothing, medicating and educating the miscreant.
And when care is substandard, as a federal judge has decided and the state has acknowledged, intervention is warranted.
Fortunately for Brown, none of the local officials he was browbeating had the guts to challenge his legal authority. Global warming is, after all, a popular cause for any politician to espouse, and Brown was already making noises about riding the issue into another stint as California's governor in 2010. Threatened with potentially endless litigation, the local officials backed down and allowed Brown to vet their land-use plans by whatever standard he deemed to impose.
Opposing federal intervention on behalf of felons is popular with those on the political right while opposing global warming endears Brown to the left. And after all, he is the man who, as governor three decades ago, espoused a political "canoe theory" in which one paddles on the right for a while and then paddles on the left to move ahead.
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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