To the editor: Guest contributor Lanhee J. Chen writes that “California needs to think outside the blue box,” (March 18). He claims that one-party Democratic rule smothers debate and critical thinking. While I believe he is correct about the problem with one-party rule, he is wrong about the cause of the current dysfunction in Sacramento.
California doesn’t need to think outside the blue box. What California needs is a strong, healthy Republican Party that thinks outside the Trump box. California Republican candidates need to stop acting like President Trump lapdogs and start acting like Californians.
I consider myself a centrist, and while I tend to vote Democratic, I believe that the Democrats have swung so far to the left as to be unrecognizable. However, I am disgusted with Trump. Until Republican candidates develop a backbone and come up with some ideas that might make sense to a majority of Californians, they are going to continue to lose statewide elections.
As an example, our last three Republican governors, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were pro-choice. Can you even imagine a California Republican running for statewide office as pro-choice today? As shown by recent ballot measures, most Californians are pro-choice but Republicans, swooning to Trump, won’t go there. Don’t even get me started on immigration reform.
The reason Democrats continue to win statewide elections is not because Californians are dyed-in-the wool liberals. It is because the alternative is so unpalatable.
Mark Shoup, Apple Valley
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To the editor: Chen is completely right in pointing out the hazards of a one-party Legislature. Without opposition, we Democrats can and do drift into positions that are out of step with mainstream Democratic ideals. However, Chen misses the mark. The reason we have saddled ourselves with a supermajority, is because the Republicans continue to cling to far-right policies and rhetoric. As long as Republicans continue to espouse their uncomfortable positions to the detriment of California, they will remain a super-minority.
Raul Sahagun, Hacienda Heights
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To the editor: California has long struggled with the notion of “being tough on crime,” a buzz phrase that has excused the state’s unforgiving system of harsh over-criminalization. A painful back-and-forth of different standards of punishment has led the state to where it is now, once again, harshly re-criminalizing certain drug and theft crimes with Proposition 36, which allows felony charges in cases that were at some times misdemeanors.
The real root cause of the issue isn’t that looser crime regulations don’t work, as is insinuated in this commentary, but rather that they don’t work alone. The problem with these attempts to commit to more humane justice policies is that they are half-hearted at best.
Loosening punishments without adding the investment in communities, rehabilitative efforts, after-school programs for juveniles and every other addition that goes along with less-harsh criminal codes is setting these moves up to fail.
The de-facto one-party system in California has failed in several ways, but an actual crime-reform strategy was never given a chance. It’s time that we stop perpetuating this binary thinking and do the real work to make California safe, which won’t happen if we continue locking up our residents en masse in the name of “tough on crime.”
Katie Aronson, Los Angeles
