Brown recently compared San Francisco's Prop B to the kind of power consolidation you'd expect from Trump or Putin. His argument? The measure isn't really about good governance or democratic accountability. It's a thinly veiled political hit job aimed squarely at Aaron Peskin.

Now, let's be clear: we're not exactly members of the Aaron Peskin fan club here at The Dissent. The man has never met a regulation he didn't want to expand or a developer he didn't want to obstruct. But there's a difference between opposing someone's politics and rigging the structural rules of government to sideline a specific person. One is democracy. The other is something else entirely.

Term limits, in principle, are great. We're generally fans of anything that keeps career politicians from building permanent fiefdoms with taxpayer money. But Prop B isn't a principled stand for rotation in office — it's a surgical strike dressed up as reform. And that distinction matters.

Here's the uncomfortable truth for fiscal conservatives and liberty-minded San Franciscans: if you let one faction rewrite the rules to target their enemies today, there's nothing stopping the other faction from doing the same thing tomorrow. Institutional integrity isn't sexy, but it's the only thing standing between functional governance and pure political warfare.

Brown, whatever you think of his politics (and we have thoughts), spent decades navigating Sacramento and Oakland's bureaucratic swamps. When a four-time governor who's seen every trick in the book calls something out as cynical power politics, the pattern recognition is probably worth trusting.

San Francisco has real problems — a budget deficit, a fentanyl crisis, businesses fleeing downtown. Voters deserve ballot measures that actually address those issues, not ones that settle political scores under the guise of reform. If you want term limits, write a real term-limits measure. Apply it universally. Make it about principle, not personnel.

Otherwise, don't be surprised when voters start wondering who the real authoritarians are.