pet connection

Here we go again …

Faced with the state Department of Finance objections that the forced spay-neuter bill (AB 1634) will put more animal in shelters and more animals to death than we currently have and, as a result, cost the California taxpayers more money, the dis-elected, running-out-the-clock state Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is still scrambling to stick it to the people who worked to get him tossed out on his ear by trying every maneuver in the professional politician’s playbook to make his bill into a palatable piece of sausage the state Senate will pass and send to the governor for consideration.

For Levine, it never was about animals. He doesn’t have them and couldn’t care less. He has always been about nanny-stating us to death with bills that have unintended consequences, working in a way that makes me want to donate money and time to the GOP — and I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat.

It’s just about winning for him, and the animals be damned. Which, if this bill passes, they will be.

Everyone who stayed awake in high school civics knows the making of laws is often compared to the making of sausage. You don’t know what went into it, you don’t want to watch, but it usually comes out fine in the end.

Usually.

But laws that are hustled through on gamesmanship and winning at all costs are rotten sausage indeed, and that’s why if you’re in California you need to call and fax again — yes, again – to explain to the nice staffer at your state Senator’s office that nothing, no amendment, no tweak, no change will ever make forced spay-neuter (which is what this is, according to its advocate’s call to action) something that will help put and keep more pets in more homes.

And that’s not all. This bill forces action without due process, without appeal, without exceptions for working dogs, service dogs and heritage breeds, and is an invitation to the capricious harassment of a neighbor or a rogue civil servant (yeah, they do exist). Doesn’t that bother you? It sure bothers me.

Now, some background.

I have done a fair amount of covering the sausage-makinglegislative process as a journalist, and to be honest, most of that coverage has been the inside-baseball-winners-losers stuff that’s the standard for such work. But in recent years I’ve shifted to the other side of the line for some of my work in the non-pet-related part of my professional life, and that has given me a very interesting view of how this democracy stuff is supposed to work.

A portion of my part-time, steady pay and bennies “day job” as a writer-editor for the local community owned utility involves staffing the public meetings of the utility’s elected board of directors. I really enjoy this work, in part because I’m at heart a policy wonk and in part because I enjoy seeing elected representatives who represent their constituents and work for the public good. (By the way, I’m so not sucking up writing about this, since no one at work except my pet-loving friends Sonia and Debbie — hi guys! — ever read this blog.)

Unless there’s a problem or a controversy, members of the public never come to these meetings, as is common with almost all government hearings. It’s all staff and special interests. Policy is set, contracts awarded, infrastructure projects given the go-ahead, budgets approved and more. Meetings, meetings, meetings, the oil that keeps the machine of government running.

The minor, unpaid elected officials I watch in these meetings do their homework and ask tough, detailed questions — sometimes to the point where the staff engineers, project managers and executives look a little deer-in-the-headlights. Not only do these small-time elected officials look out for all the customers served by the utility, but they also look out for the customers in each of the wards that elected them, addressing the issues that are of greater concern for poorer neighborhoods or older ones, for example. They advocate, ceaselessly, openly and honestly, for the people who elected them.

Cynical old me? I love seeing it.

Which brings me back to the win-at-all costs mentality of professional politicians like state Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, people who no doubt once had the desire for public service like I see all the time at the public meetings I staff for the “day job.” But now, in the waning days of his time as a elected representative, it’s about the game and the winning. I just can’t see any other explanation for his behavior, faced with the knowledge that his forced spay-neuter bill takes rights away from people without due process, provides absolutely no public benefit in return and puts in place a practice that has failed everywhere it has been tried.

Forced spay-neuter kills more pets. That may seem counter-intuitive to many, but that’s the reality.

But much as I don’t want more pets to die as an unintended consequence of a piece of sound-bite legislation — and they have and will, everywhere these bills pass — I really don’t want what Lloyd Levine represents now to be what our government is all about.

Which is why as an an animal-lover and a citizen I’ll be calling and faxing today.

Again.

And again, if need be.

Lloyd Levine is counting on the fact that we have called and faxed before and figure we don’t have to call and fax again. He is counting on being able to argue that everything that has been said about this pet-killing, rights-grabbing, invitation-to-abuse bill can be tossed out after he has tweaked it again and sleazed it to a vote with his skill in gaming the process. He is counting on us not to bother, to shrug and say, “What can I do? It’s how the government works, and it’s wrong, but so it goes.”

What can you do? You can say, today, that enough is enough. You can call your state Senator this morning. Again. And again, if need be.

And if that doesn’t work, you can call and fax the governor.

Maybe in so doing you’ll send a message that although there truly are selfless elected officials who look out for the people who elected them — and I tell you, I have seen them — we have had enough of the other kind.

Good riddance, Mr. Levine.

That’s a message this time is as good a time any to send, since we’re all animal-lovers and this matters to us.

And hey, after you get a taste of taking your government back, you might find you like it. You might even end up as once of those selfless small-time elected officials, looking out for the rest of us.

You never know!

***

Here is what’s wrong with forced spay-neuter, from a previous post. Here’s even more detail. You can find even more by searching this blog for “1634″ and honestly, we need to change that so all these are grouped with a common keyword, since these forced spay-neuter bills are popping up everywhere now.

And they are all really bad for pets.