Making Sense by Michael Reagan

You don’t want to live in my state.

Sure, it’s beautiful. The weather is great.

And most people who live here are nice, good, successful, talented, smart – except when it comes to politics and voting.

That’s when a majority of Californians fall somewhere between crazy and suicidal.

For several decades the liberal Democrats that my fellow Californians keep electing to state and local offices have done their best to turn our paradise into Hell for conservatives.

Everyone knows about our criminally high taxes, idiotic environmental regulations, fiscal irresponsibility, unsolvable homeless problem and our Welcome Wagon policy toward illegal immigrants.

Lately we’ve created sanctuary cities and become a sanctuary state.

You’d think it couldn’t get worse out here on the Left Coast.

But the stupidity of our liberal politicians is infinite, as the supervisors of Los Angeles County proved earlier this month when they approved a $550,000 pilot program to deal with the local homeless crisis.

Proposing a solution that could only have been dreamed up in La-La Land, the county wants to pay homeowners like me to let homeless people live in our backyards.

Not in colorful tents and sleeping bags.In cozy new tiny houses or refurbished garden sheds and converted garages.

I think I’ll pass on the idea, without trying to make a NIMBY joke.

But I’m sure all of my goodhearted, Hillary-loving, BMW-driving neighbors will be signing up to make the county’s pilot program a big success.

Keeping a homeless person in your backyard like a pet is the kind of solution you get from government when you live in a one-party state run by Democrats.

Unfortunately, because of a dumb constitutional amendment approved by 53.7 percent of our voters in 2010, the future of Republicans and conservatives out here looks grim.

Most people east of the Hollywood Sign have never heard of California Proposition 14, a.k.a. the Top-Two Primaries Amendment, and have no idea how much damage it did to our state’s political system.

Prop 14 was an amendment that established a type of primary election in which all of the candidates for a specific statewide office like governor or the U.S. Senate- whether they are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Communists, etc. — are listed together on the same primary ballot.

The top two vote-getters – even if both are Democrats or Communists – are the only candidates that advance to the general election in the fall.

Though Prop 14 sounds like it was imported from Venezuela or Cuba, it was supported by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and big liberal newspapers like the LA Times.

But the major political parties, the ACLU and anyone with half a political brain saw the phony reform for the disaster it has become.

Opponents charged that Prop 14 was designed to limit voter choice, which it was.

They knew it would often result in two candidates from the same party facing off in general elections, which it has.

Given the Democrat Party’s large plurality in California, in the fall that we usually have two Democrats running for U.S. Senator, two Democrats running for governor and two Democrats running for many U.S. House seats or state legislative offices.

The politics of my beautiful state today are rigged and Republicans have become an endangered species.

A Republican’s vote no longer counts. The state GOP doesn’t really exist.

And a conservative candidate for dog catcher has to be a billionaire because she’ll get no money from the Republican National Committee or anyone else.

California’s only hope for a better future is that things will get so bad there’s a huge backlash that produces a political miracle in 2020 like the one that put Donald Trump in the White House.

It’s a long shot, but crazy things can happen in California.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

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