And so it ends. The saga of police Chief Paco Balderama ends as he
announces his resignation today. And I want to dig into this and try to
you know, I recognize this is the end of the day. All of
the Fresno commentariat has been able to comment on and Trevor just had three hours
to comment on it. I want to try to look at this a little
bit differently. I don't want to do I think the obvious thing is to
do a little bit of Oh, that's really bad, and it's really bad
that he had this affair and he's fired, and there's sort of the obvious
stuff. But I want to just a little bit look at Jerry Dyer.
Jerry Dyer and the city manager of Fresno and White. Now, Dyer and
Georgia and White are the two people in city government who have oversight over the
chief of police. The chief of police answers to them, uniquely, does
not answer to the city council. Okay, the city council can take a
vote and all of them can vote to fire the chief of police, and
it does not matter. That is not their job, that's not their role.
The mayor is the executive official charged with executing law within the city of
Fresno, and the police chief is under him answers to him, and I
guess I just sort of wonder they learned about this investigation over a month ago.
They learned about this weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks ago, before
the public learned about it, before it became a story that hit the airwaves
and the newspapers. They also knew more of the details of the nature of
the accusation than we did. They knew that Balderama was accused of having an
affair with another officer's wife. And this other officer, by the way,
just you know, sin makes you stupid. You know that's a long standing
thing. If you're thinking with some part of your body that gets a lot
of blood flow that isn't your brain, you are going to make some dumb
decisions. And among the many, many dumb decisions that Paco Baldorama made that
has cost him now his job and you know, rocks his marriage and is
just entirely disastrous and disruptive to the community and all the good things he was
doing as police chief. The woman he was having an affair with is the
wife of a former has no police officer who is currently a supervisor for Madera
County, Jordan Wamhoff And this guy and mister Wamhoff is was also when he
was on the police force, he was a vice president with the Police Officers
union. That seems like, you know, if you're trying to pick somebody
to have an affair with, that would seem to be some pretty poor decision
making. Maybe don't have an affair with the guy who's with the wife of
the guy who is a VP for the union, you know, has an
interest in very tightly closely monitoring you and your performance and your conduct visa v
members of the union. So of course the Police Officers Union was furious about
this. Rightly they should be, now dire and Georgia and white. They
knew about this, they knew about it way before we did, and their
response, and they knew that Balderama admitted to the relationship. So why didn't
they fire him right then? I guess that's the thing I don't get.
What did they think was going to happen? Did they think that they could
just leave this man on, leave him in the job, not even put
him on paid administrative leave. Let's remember he only got put on paid administrative
leave, like a week or two ago. That disastrous press conference or not
even a press conference. It's kind of a little press scrum that happened outside
of the city council chamber while the city Council was debating the budget and he
happened to be there for some of the budgetary questions and he walks by and
he gets into it with a reporter from the GV wire and he says,
at first, I'm not going to talk about this, and then proceeds to
talk about it for a long long time and makes a complete ass of himself,
looks totally like sort of like rationalizing his own conduct. And so,
if I was an insurance salesman, do you think any of this would have
made news? And it's like, no, cause you're the chief of police.
You're not an insurance salesman. It's a bigger deal. And the accusation
is not that you're the chief of police and you had any old affair.
You had an affair with the subordinates wife. So Dyern knows about this,
doesn't fire him. Well, we need to keep we have an ongoing investigation.
That's what he marches. Andrew Jans the city attorney out to say,
we have an ongoing investigation. We'll let you know more and when we know
more, which makes me think, what more is there precisely to investigate?
He was having an affair with a subordinates wife. Isn't that a gots to
go situation? I mean, I don't know, maybe my workplace is weird
like this, but if I had a sexual relationship with the spouse of one
of my employees and my board of directors knew that I did it, they
learned that I did it, I admitted to them that I did it,
I would be fired in five minutes. It's not even like what else is
there to investigate? And I guess it makes me wonder did Dyer kind of
think that as long as the story didn't become public, as long as the
threat of lawsuit of a lawsuit stayed stayed quiet, under wrapped behind closed doors
with the city, did he think they could just kind of ride it out
with pocked, with Baldurama still in the police chief's chair. Did did did
we? Did he really think that that was a likely to happen or be
that it's normatively what should have happened. I guess I don't understand why the
city at president didn't sort of move more swiftly and either make this guy resign
or fire him, like as soon as they learned he did this. I
guess it just sort of seems to me like it's such obvious misconduct, it's
such obviously inescapably unacceptable conduct that how did they how did they not act sooner
on this? And instead they issue this medium mouthed statement that it was an
off duty relationship he was involved in with a non city employee, a non
city employee. Yeah, but she was the spouse of a city employee.
Like like they say non city employee, as if that makes it not as
bad, when actually it is equal. I don't know. Maybe equally is
bad. And I admit, Yeah, if you're the police chief and you're
having an affair with somebody and it's someone who's completely not connected, family,
whatever, anything to the police department, Okay, that's bad, that's immoral.
It's probably very much gonna hurt your marriage. But is it such that
you should get fired from your job? Well maybe not quite possibly not,
but how I mean? But instead he has this relationship with some with the
spouse of someone who is subordinate to him. So I just I guess this
is the thing I don't understand. I understand Balderama resigning. He should have
that, it's entirely the correct thing for him to do. I'm sort of
thinking that he has some delusions of grandeur about his ability to get another job.
The story came out last week he was applying to be the chief of
police for the city of Austin, Texas, which is a much bigger city
than Fresno. It's like nine hundred thousand people present only has five hundred something
thousand people. I'm not sure that the city of Austin will be like,
oh, yes, let's hire this guy who had to resign in disgrace after
he was bedoinking another officer's wife and the other officer in question was the VP
of the union. Oh I'm sure our union will really be excited for this
hire. But I don't understand. I feel like Jerry Dyers living in Lalla
Land again, Like, why wouldn't you think as soon as you learn he
does that it's a gotstig situation, is it? I mean, any other
line of work, if you sleep with the support and its wife, you've
got to go. But here's the mayor. Here's the story from GV Wire
about it. Mayor Jerry Dyer praised Balderama for his accomplishments in Fresno, while
also saying that the chief's resignation was in the best interest of the city and
the police department. The mayor also said that there's no reason why Baldurama couldn't
serve as a police chief of another city. Quote, and I expect him
to do so, Jerry, are you nuts? There's no reason. I've
got a reason he had to resign in disgrace from here because he slept with
another officer's wife. Again, this guy's applying to be the chief of police
in Austin, Texas. You think the officers in Austin will be like,
oh boy, this guy was chief of police of a smaller department than this,
presumably less pressure, and in the pressures of that job, he couldn't
constrain himself such that you know, maybe he didn't whatever go voteo doo off
with the wife of one of the union reps, of one of the union
vice presidents. Jerry, there is a massive reason why he probably can't be
chief of police, certainly not of a city bigger than Fresno. I don't
know, maybe he can be chief of police and Sanger or Parleier or Mendota
or some town a lot smaller than Fresno. And by the way, he
did a really good job in Fresno as police chief. As chief of police,
seems like we got nothing to complain about. So a fairly big California
legal matter happened last week with a proposed state ballot initiative called the Taxpayer Protection
Act. Basically, this was a proposed ballot initiative, okay, So it
was something that its proponents were hoping to get on the ballot this November,
and it was being challenged in the courts whether this was the kind of thing
that could be approved as an amendment to the California Constitution by the voters of
the state. Now, a couple things to understand. California was a real
leader in the whole arena of state ballot initiatives to change law, all right,
And these were the so called Progressive era policies that California really led the
way with. In I guess it was late eighteen hundreds, early early nineteen
hundreds, and the progressive movement was basically in that time. I'm not talking
about modern day progressivism. I'm talking about the progressivism of the late eighteen hundreds
early nineteen hundreds. The progressivism of that time was looking at various kinds of
entrenched cultural and political norms and saying that they were bad and that they needed
to be radically changed in different ways. That basically there was this sense of
entrenched, fat cat political interests dominating either Congress or state legislators state legislatures who
were not authentically representing the views of the people. And so a lot of
truly democratic proposals came about for how state governments could regulate whereby the people could
directly pass laws and bypass their statela their own state legislatures, because again they
thought that their state legislatures were full of these sort of entrenched interests who you
know, couldn't be sort of their state legislatures and their governors or these entrenched
interests sort of disconnected from the people, not really responsive to the people's needs.
Let's come up with a truly democratic solution. And by democratic I mean
the individual people directly voting on laws. That is the essence of what quote
democracy is. I think sometimes we use the word democracy in a very loosey
goosey way. We use the word democracy basically to mean any time any kind
of political system where anyone is voting on anything, and properly speaking, democracy
means something a little bit more narrow than that. What we have in America
is not really a pure It is not at all a pure democracy. Our
president is not elected by just a popular vote of the people. Our laws
are not passed by popular votes of the people. Generally speaking, we have
a kind of republican system with different interests that counter veil against just the pure
raw will of the majority. Okay, the president is not directly elected by
a majority of the people. He's elected by a majority of the electoral college,
which represents all the individual congressional districts and Senate seats. So hence,
as Donald Trump did, as George W. Bush did in two thousand,
you can lose the popular vote but still win the electoral college vote. All
right, So in America we don't really have a democratic system. But in
the early twentieth century a lot of the progressive reform movements thought we should have
a system to allow the people to directly make law, to bypass the state
legislatures, okay, And we have that system in California through the ballot initiative
process. The ballot initiative process allows people the people to gather enough signatures and
thereby introduce a proposed new law, just a normal statute, or even a
proposed new state constitutional amendment, and have the citizens of California just vote on
it up or up or down, yes or no. If you gather this
many signatures, you can qualify something as just a state statute, a statute
that could be passed, or that can be passed and then can be overturned
by a normal statute by another normal statute, or you can get a larger
number of signatures to propose something as an amendment to the state constitution. Now,
the Constitution of the United States of America were sort of more familiar to
that. I think in our everyday civics understanding of civics and kids in school
learn a little bit more about the US Constitution than they do about their individual
state constitutions. But every single state in the Union has a state constitution.
Yes, we have the US Constitution that governs the mechanisms for our federal government,
but every individual state has its own state constitution. Ohio has a state
constitution, Hawaii has a state constitution, Florida has a state constitution, and
California has a state constitution. Now we all know, well maybe hopefully some
of you know, it's really, really, really hard to amend the US
Constitution. It requires the two thirds votes in both the House and the Senate,
and then you need three quarters of all the state legislatures to agree to
something before you can actually amend the Constitution. Now, the Constitution, both
at the federal level and at individual state levels, the Constitution is basically the
foundational law for that jurisdiction. For the US constitutions, the foundational law for
the federal government, and the California State Constitution is our fundamental law here in
California. It has all the main structures for how our government works and functions
and acts. Now, a group of fiscal conservative types from southern California,
Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and other folks like that, and maybe it's a rant
for another day, but there's a part of me that just despises Orange County
fiscal conservatism, which I think has led to these phony conservative who completely abandoned
the field on education policy on social policy. All these years we had Republican
governors and somehow we couldn't make you know, California public schools like not be
just little factories churning out generation after generation of Liberals. So there's a part
of me that despises southern California fiscal Orange County conservatism. And by the way,
there's still for people who don't know this, the Republican Party in California
is mostly dead, but Orange County is still a real hub of national Republican
fundraising. There is a ton of Republican money down there. And you'll notice
that presidential candidates, you know, Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressional candidates.
I mean, I saw a tweet from Mara Flores, who's running for Congress.
Had she briefly won election to Congress in this super heavy Latino district near
like Brownsville, Texas a couple of years ago, and she's running to try
to win that seat back saw her tweeting about, Oh, it just happened
to be visiting Orange County. Yeah, there's a distinct reason why all of
these Republicans from other parts of the country just just happened to make a quick
little jaunt over to Orange County. It's because there's tons of Republican money there,
tons. So Donald Trump flies in there, this person flies in there.
That person. Yeah, there's tons of Republican money in Orange County.
And they were proposing a statewide ballot initiative to amend the California Constitution basically to
require a two thirds legislative vote and voter approval a ballot initiative in front of
all the people of California for any fee and charge increases, as the title
of it goes, Really, for any increase in taxes or if you want
to call them fees, if you want to call them charge it, whatever
you want to call them, any increase in taxes, you need a two
thirds votes vote of the legislature and a vote by the people, So a
yes vote. This is from ballot Pedia, which I think is a mostly
neutral source for reading about this stuff. Ballot Pedia says a yes vote would
have supported amending the state constitution to define all state and local levies, charges,
and fees as taxes and to require new state taxes proposed by the state
legislature to be enacted via a two thirds legislative vote and voter approval, and
new local taxes to be enacted via a two thirds vote of the electorate.
Okay, so basically, if you want to do a local tax increase,
it's going to require a two thirds vote by the voters. And if you
want a state wide tax increase, has to have a two thirds vote in
both houses of legislature and a majority of all Californians have to vote for it.
Well, the State Supreme Court ruled basically, it was challenged whether this
was even something that could be done, whether this ballot initiative is even something
that could happen. And I at first saw this and thought, but it's
proposing to amend the constitution. You can amend the constitution however you want,
can't you. There's no limits on the nature of how you can amend a
state constitution. There's no provision for, you know, limitations on what on
how you can amend, say the US Constitution. But the California State Supreme
Court ruled in a way that I found to be a bit of a stretch,
that yes, there are limits on how you can amend the California State
Constitution, that this actually constitutes a revision of the California State Constitution. And
you might think to yourself that amend and revise are pretty close synonyms, right,
I mean, they're pretty close. I'm pretty sure if you have a
posaurus and you look up amend, you'll probably see revised as one of the
options there. If you look up revised, you might see amend as one
of the options in there. But no, apparently a revision is something broader.
Now, when we return, I want to talk about was this just
the California State Supreme Court being packed with Democrats and playing pure pow politics or
is there something there and what does this mean for the future of California politics.
That is next on the John Girardi Show. The California State Supreme Court
last week blocked a proposed state ballot initiative which would have amended, slash possibly
revised the California State Constitution to make it more difficult to increase taxes in California.
Basically, what it would do is it would require any statewide increase in
taxes to be done by a two thirds majority in both houses of the legislature
plus a statewide vote by the people, And it would require any local taxes
let's say like a Fresno County tax or something to be passed by a two
thirds majority of the voters. This was blocked from even appearing on the state
ballot by the California State Supreme Court, and it was a huge political victory
for the Democrats. Democrats and especially labor unions were going to throw everything they
had into stopping this ballot initiative. Okay, labor unions were CiU all that
crowd. They were ready to spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat this
as a ballot initiative. And basically the California State Supreme Court gave them the
victory before they even had to start fighting. So this is a massive win
for Democrats. Now, for myself, policy wise, I don't know what
I think about having two thirds votes by the people just to pass a tax
increase. It seems a bit much to me. But I want to get
into the question here of the California State Supreme Court. Now, California State
Supreme Court has seven members. Of those seven members, six were appointed by
Jerry Brown or Gavin Newsom, including the Chief Justice, Patricia Guerrero. One
justice was appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, so this is a very liberal
leaning Supreme Court, and some of the justices, like Leandra Krueger are super
duper left wing. From my understanding, and looking at Krueger's background, she
was part of the Obama DOJ for a long time. Like she's yeah,
she's she's something else, all right. Now, the State Supreme Court basically
decided this is not something that the people of California can vote on. Even
this is not They cannot amend the constitution this way to require this kind of
a hurdle before increasing taxes. And when I heard this at first, I
was like what And frankly, I guess I'm a bit more familiar with some
of these basics of federal law rather than California law, and I thought,
well, it's a constitutional amendment. They can amend it, however they want.
What's the deal. What business does the State Supreme Court have saying that
this kind of a constitutional amendment is impermissible. Well, apparently the State Supreme
Court thinks there is a difference between a revision of the Constitution and an amendment
to the Constitution. A revision of the Constitution, and the State Constitution has
a section in it that talks about revising or amending the Constitution, but in
the parts where it talks about the ability of the people to amend the Constitution
through the ballot initiative, it only talks about amendment, not revision. Now,
at first I just thought, well, you're making a big distinction between
two things that are basically the same things. But apparently there's a more long
standing legal tradition in California, going back at least as far as I could
see, from to the fifties, of a distinction under California law between a
revision to the Constitution, to the state Constitution, and an amendment. And
basically the idea is a amendment to the Constitution retains the same basic structure of
government that we have in California, but it's just tweaking it. It's just
changing one or two things without fundamentally altering the essentials of what California government and
governance is. A revision of the State Constitution is something broader. It's changing
some of the more foundational structures of how the whole thing is supposed to work
according to the provisions of the California Constitution that have to deal with the ballid
initiative process and the ability of the people to simply amend the constitution. Apparently
the people don't have the power to introduce quote, they don't have the power
to introduce revisions of the constitution. Okay, and let's remember what this is.
California adopted these progressive air policies to directly let the people vote on changes
to their laws, vote on changes to the state constitution, even in order
to bypass entrenched political interests in the governor's chair, in the state legislature,
etc. But apparently the provision that allows for amending the state constitution by a
vote of the people, people have to gather enough signatures to qualify something as
a state constitutional amendment, and then if a majority of the people vote on
it, the constitution is amended. But that's only for amending the constitution,
not revising it. To revise the constitution requires some kind of involvement, some
kind of vote by the state legislature to call for a California constitutional convention.
Now is it legit to call this proposal which again, this was the Taxpayer
Protection Act, a proposed California state constitutional amendment that the Supreme Court struck down.
Struck down from allowing the people of California to even vote on and consider
on the grounds that, Nope, this isn't a constitutional amendment. This would
be a revision of our whole system of government. Is it actually a revision
of the whole system of government? Simply to increase the bar, to lift
up, heighten the bar the threshold that needs to be passed in order to
increase taxes, to now require for any statewide increase of taxes to require a
vote by the people, and for any local increase of taxes to require a
two thirds vote by the people. Is that really a revision of the constitution.
I mean, the State Supreme Court was saying, well, no,
no, no Prop thirteen, which also mandated certain higher threshold for how you
increase property taxes. No. Prop thirteen was okay, but this is not
Does that really revise the whole basic structure of California policy. I mean,
it's not like we're not talking about eliminating the State Assembly here. Yeah,
that would probably be a revision. If you got rid of one of the
two houses of the state legislature, that's probably a revision rather than an amendment.
I guess what I'm concerned is happening here, and by the way,
this is even beyond the policy consideration. I don't know that I even agree
with the policy consideration of requiring a two thirds vote for any local tax increase.
That seems a little steep to me. I'm not even talking about the
policy. I guess my concern is that the State Supreme Court, by this
action, in a highly politicized environment, is stepping in to block something that
Democrats hate and Republicans like on the grounds that no, it's not a constitutional
amendment, it's a constitutional revision, which seemingly I don't know that there's a
clear cut, clean distinction between the two, and I begin to fear that
it's just going to be the California State Constitution blocking any kind of conservative proposed
constitutional amendment that comes down the pipeline. If a bunch of pro lifers,
let's say we're able to qualify something for the ballot that says we're out longing
through trimester abortions in California, I bet if you put that in front of
the people, a majority of them would vote for it. What if the
State Supreme Court said, well, no, that's a fundamental revision to our
state constitution, changes the whole structure of things. You can't have the people
vote on it, Well, why the heck not? It seems blooney.
You see what I'm saying here. Given the political makeup of the States Supreme
Court, given the highly politicized nature of this particular debate, I'm afraid that
the California State Supreme Court has sort of hollowed out the democratic progressive reforms in
California such that the people can't directly really make their laws in California anymore.
To close the show for today, as we close the Paco Balderama saga and
we put that behind us, I'm reminded of a little wisdom from my dad.
My late dad, doctor Joseph Girardi, passed away a couple months ago.
I still miss him every single day. And one of the things my
dad was a surgeon at Valley Children's Hospital, and he was at various times
head of the orthopedic department, head of surgery, had a lot of different
leadership and oversight positions over there at Children's and had a lot of wisdom,
and apparently within Valley Children's he was famous for giving these sort of continuing education
kind of lectures, Lectures about physician wellness and basically as a physician, how
to be happy, how to be fulfilled, how to be content, how
to you know, thrive in your job. And he had a couple of
real pearls of wisdom that I thought were there were a lot of because he
had seen a lot of doctors who had fallen prey to different things that made
them unhappy. Like one of his big things was, you know, understand
that you're really good at being a surgeon. You're not really good at being
a day trader or a real estate flipper or this or that. Stick with
the thing that you're good at. Don't try to, like be chasing other
kinds of money making schemes like that, because I think he'd seen surgeons who
had done stupid stuff and wasted and lost a whole bunch of money pursuing like
some other thing. Do what you're good at, Excel at what you're good
at, Thrive at what you're good at. And one of the big things
in this lecture, and I'm trying to find from folks at the hospital if
they have a video of it, because I'd love to get the actual video
of it. All I have is his old laptop and I've got his PowerPoint
slides of it, so I'm only getting kind of the bare bones of it.
And one of the things he really heavily talks about for physician wellness makes
me think of this Paco Balderama story. Don't cheat on your spouse, don't
get divorced, you know, and just to you know, not to be
John Girardi moralizer here, And it's not exactly some novel moral lesson. Hey,
don't cheat on your spouse. It astonishes it astonishes me and makes me
wonder how good of a job Balderama was doing. Frankly, that he was
police chief for about three years and he's three and a half years. He's
spent two of those years having an affair. That's a lot of sneaking around
and a lot of lying, and a lot of making me question, how
hard actually were you working? I mean, I don't work as hard as
the chief of police does in my job. I'm not acting like I work
harder than every single person. No, I don't. I don't know that
I would have even the I don't understand how I would have the time to
fit into my schedule also having an affair, and again, just the kinds
of things that bring you happiness and fulfillment, are doing well the things that
are set before you, including raising your family, being with your wife,
being with your kids, and doing your job well. So maybe let that
be a lesson to any of you. If you're thinking of going down this
Paco Balderrama road, let the spirit of doctor Joe Girardi advise you, no,
do not do that. That'll do it for John Girardi Show, seey'all
next time on Power Talk