“Read this article,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted this morning, linking to a commentary by Dan Morain, senior editor of the Sacramento Bee.

Morain describes a backroom attempt by Democrats to sabotage the open-primary measure on the June ballot. In effect, lawyers for the legislature and lawyers for a state employees union were secretly negotiating a change in the measure’s ballot summary.

When he was speaker of the Assembly, Democrat Willie Brown of San Francisco had a reputation as a deal maker, but Brown told Morain he was “flabbergasted” by the legislature’s conduct these days.

In his commentary – here – Morain notes that the state Legislature has an approval rating of 16 percent. “I wonder who those people are,” he says.

As our politics slips into the ooze, we often blame special interests and their lobbyists, but the politicians we elect decide whether government will represent the public’s best interests. Or not.

In the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, columnist Matt Bai wrote about the motivations of the members of Congress: “The political system is imperiled mostly because too many of our politicians just can’t seem to imagine any worse fate in life than losing an election.”

It is this determination to protect their jobs at all costs that lead politicians to the shameful business described in Morain’s commentary.

You can read Bai’s column – “Laws for Sale” – by clicking here.