Every now and then, the ghost of John C. Calhoun walks again. In his latest incarnation, the specter of the man one historian called "the Marx of the master class" has invested the campaign of the brewers, oil companies and nicotine peddlers who want to make sure that when it comes to taxes democracy doesn't rear its ugly head.

They call themselves Californians Against Higher Taxes and they're pouring tons of money into the campaign against Proposition 56, the measure on next week's primary ballot that would lower the legislative margin needed to pass a budget or raise state taxes from 67 percent to 55 percent.

It's all a plot, say the CAHT commercials, to pick your pocket. You need that supermajority to protect the third of citizens who don't want to pay higher taxes from the two-thirds who do.
Calhoun would have understood. Calhoun, a South Carolinian who was probably the most original American political thinker of the 19th century, formulated the Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority in the generation before the Civil War to protect the slave states from the growing political and economic power of the North.

On divisive issues such as the admission of new territories, he argued, the preservation of the Union depended either on requiring affirmative votes from both the North and South or (what amounted to the same thing) constitutional veto power for each section. That was the only means by which "different interests, classes or portions" of the nation could be protected ... and all conflict and struggle between them prevented."

California is one of a handful of U.S. states to require a supermajority to pass a budget, a provision that has given political minorities an effective veto and has turned them into Calhoun's "concurrent majority" and gridlocked the legislative budget process. In all but one or two years during the past two decades, budgets have been late, vendors left unpaid, school systems left hanging and the state embarrassed.

It's also allowed the two parties to duck responsibility and created the bipartisan conspiracy that deferred real decisions year after year.

It has fostered the borrowing, dodging and fudging that's helped run up the state's monster deficit and deferred the tough choices that Proposition 57, Arnold Schwarzenegger's deficit bond, also on next week's ballot, would defer again.

Where fundamental rights or constitutional processes are involved it makes sense, as the nation's founders understood, to require supermajorities, thus checking the whims and public passions of the moment.

Many of the same voters who supported Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that would have denied schooling and other public services to illegal immigrants, now say they oppose denying illegal immigrant children the right to go to school. The federal courts overturned key provisions of the initiative before they changed their mind.

But taxes, which can be reduced by simple majorities at any moment, are a different matter. Indeed, under the present arrangement, tax breaks for corporations and other fat cats (like the members of CAHT) can be, and often are, approved by simple majorities. But ending such breaks requires a two-thirds vote in each house of the Legislature. The loopholes are, as tax reformer Lenny Goldberg says, like a roach motel. Once in, they never come out.

Right now the Democratic majorities in the Legislature are large enough that budgets could be passed or taxes raised without a single Republican vote. But the governor still retains his veto, and while many legislators are safe in their gerrymandered districts, they are not that safe against voters angry about high taxes.

Forty years ago, in the era cited even by conservatives such as Sen. Tom McClintock as California's golden age, California survived even though the Legislature could (and did) raise taxes by simple majority. The two-thirds rule wasn't enacted until 1978.

In 1991, when another budget crisis forced Gov. Pete Wilson to support a $14 billion combination of tax increases and budget cuts, the deal was approved despite the two-thirds vote requirement. But that was a time when, despite the tax revolt of 1978, conservative anti-tax sentiment hadn't yet hardened into rigid orthodoxy. Four years after the Wilson tax boosts, California's economy began to enjoy its biggest boom in memory.

In recent polls by the Public Policy Institute of California, 76 percent of voters say they're willing to support higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco and 71 percent are willing to impose higher marginal taxes on the state's wealthiest residents, most of whom are benefiting from the huge windfalls resulting from federal tax cuts.

Among those windfalls are the phase out of the federal estate tax, which, because a share had gone to the states, is costing California upward of $1 billion a year.

Proposition 56 will probably lose, despite the apparent willingness of voters to support some higher taxes, and California will have to live with the doctrine of the concurrent majority for another generation. The ghost of John Calhoun still haunts the land.