Lockyer vs the People

Bill Whalen of The Weekly Standard exposes how California State Attorney Bill Lockyer is failing to uphold the will of the people by writing biased ballot summaries.

It's not the first time that Lockyer, a liberal Democrat who's running for state treasurer next year, has played fast and loose with the initiative process. As the attorney general, his job is to write impartial title and ballot summaries. But that's not always been the case. The summary for another of Schwarzenegger's initiatives in this fall's special election--Proposition 76, the "Live within Our Means Act," which would enable the governor to make spending cuts when the state budget goes into the red--says little about tighter purse strings. Instead, it reads:

Changes state minimum school funding requirements ... permitting suspension of minimum funding, but terminating repayment requirement, and eliminating authority to reduce funding when state revenues decrease. Excludes above-minimum appropriations from schools' funding base.

Other examples of Lockyer's whole-language approach include Proposition 38, a school voucher initiative which lost badly in November 2000. He gave it this ominous-sounding description: "public funding of private and religious schools." The same year's Proposition 22, California's Defense of Marriage Act, was re-titled "Limits on Marriage" instead of its original "Definition of Marriage." Earlier this year, Lockyer helped chase away another initiative Democrats loathed--public pension reform--by misleadingly claiming in his summary that the measure would eliminate orphan and widow death benefits for police and firefighters.

Our attorney general who is supposed to uphold the constitution is also failing to uphold the honor of the American flag.