In Sacramento, they’ve got issues

CAN WE PLEASE stop calling it a special election? It’s not. It’s marriage counseling.

Almost every measure on Tuesday’s ballot represents a breakdown, a failure of California institutions to work things out with their significant others: governor and legislators, public unions and governor, business and Legislature. So they come to us voters for help, these troubled couples. Let’s consider their issues.

Proposition 73: Requiring parental notification for a minor seeking an abortion. Families fight about sex or money, and this is the former, trying to pretend it’s promoting “family communication.� Gloria Molina, the Los Angeles County supervisor, recalled a high school friend who committed suicide rather than tell her parents she was pregnant. Getting families to talk is a lovely notion, but a law won’t magically make it happen.

Proposition 74: Making it easier to fire teachers and requiring a longer teacher probationary period. This is really a warning shot to teachers unions: Get your own house in order or outsiders will try to do it. Market forces can get rid of some bad teachers by bringing in good ones with incentive and merit pay, more classroom authority, less red tape. Teachers should be the first to dump their bad brethren. Anyway, what is the governor of the world’s sixth-largest economy doing trying to fix public education this way? It’s like trying to get better gas mileage by losing 10 pounds.

Proposition 75: Requiring annual consent to use union members’ dues for political contributions. This is the “Mother May I?� initiative, and on the heels of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lambasting of public employees as “special interests,� it doesn’t look like “paycheck protection,� it looks like payback. Businesses don’t have to jump through these hoops. To get big-caliber money out of politics, both sides have to put the money gun down at the same time. (In Washington state, unions got around such a law and ended up stronger. So, Governor, be careful what you wish for.)

Proposition 76: Limiting spending, giving the governor unilateral budget-cutting authority. He already has a line-item veto; he already drafts a budget. Will we get an Imperial Governorship to go with the Imperial Presidency?

Proposition 77: Taking political redistricting out of legislators’ hands. Why legislators can draw their own districts mystifies me. I’d like to decide what to pay for veggie burgers at Trader Joe’s, but the world doesn’t work that way, except in politics. Eternal incumbency has less to do with the quality of candidates than drawing districts so personalized that they might as well be monogrammed instead of numbered. Safer districts for incumbents mean more partisan ones. But judges redrawing districts, in combination with existing term limits, could unwisely turn the Capitol into a “Legislator for a Day� revolving door, with no one getting enough time to accomplish anything. It would be even more of a facade fronting the real lawmakers -- the lobbyists.

Propositions 78 and 79: Both about drug discounts for the needy. Proposition 78 would make drug company discounts voluntary and cover fewer Californians; 79 would cover more Californians and let the state shop like a real family would, choosing not to do business with companies that don’t discount. Proposition 78 is the perfect Halloween-season measure: the pharmaceutical industry masquerading as ordinary folks, as if ordinary folks had a record-breaking $76 million to spend on ads and mailers.

Proposition 80: Regulating electric service providers. This is why Gov. Hiram Johnson, father of California’s progressive reforms, would want to undo the initiative process. The Legislature, not the ballot, is the place for policy minutia. True, our crack Legislature unanimously and disastrously deregulated the power industry, but what am I supposed to do, convene hearings on my patio about peak usage fluctuations?

As a member of the California Voter Marriage Counseling Service, I think these unions may be kaput. Each side might as well run off with its favorite lobbyist and live profitably ever after.