Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 7:25 pm Post subject: Cali Constitutional Convention |
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Trying to Govern California
You'll have to go to the link for a detailed explanation of why things are so bad in Cali.
However, a Constitutional Convention seems to have remarkable support.
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Calls for a new constitution have resurfaced throughout the past century, but never went far. That changed last August, as the budget negotiations were once again going off the rails, when Mr Wunderman of the Bay Area Council renewed the call for a convention and received an astonishing outpouring of support. Mr Schwarzenegger has called a constitutional convention �a brilliant idea� and thinks it is �the right way to go�. (The new constitution would take effect well after he leaves office.) Most encouragingly, says Mr Wunderman, nobody, not even the so-called special interests, has yet come out against a convention.
To the extent that there is scepticism at all, it is not about the idea of a new and cleaner constitution but about the process that might lead to it. If a convention set out to rewrite the entire constitution, it would end in the usual war over hot-button social issues such as gay marriage or the perennial Californian fight over water. And there is concern that �the nutwings are the ones who will show up, not the soccer moms,� as Ms Ross of the California Budget Project puts it. The same partisan extremists bickering about the same controversies would lead nowhere.
To address these concerns, the Bay Area Council, which has become the driving force behind the scheme, has put forth two ideas. First, delegates to the convention should be chosen through the general jury pool to ensure that the whole population, as opposed to partisans or voters, is represented. Second, the scope of the constitutional convention would be explicitly limited to governance issues and the budget mechanism and would exclude all others.
This should enable reform in the most vital and interconnected areas. These are: reducing the two-thirds requirement for budgets and taxes; mandating two-year as opposed to annual budgets; giving local governments more access to local revenues; creating less partisan districts and primary elections; disciplining the process of direct democracy with new rules about signature collection; and introducing a �sunset� commission, as Texas has, that would gradually retire overlapping jurisdictions and offices to achieve something more manageable.
The plan is to introduce voter initiatives in next year�s ballot calling for a constitutional convention, to have the convention the following year, and to put the new constitution on a ballot in 2012, when it would take effect. In the meantime both the incrementalists, such as California Forward, and the wholesale reformers, such as the Bay Area Council, are backing the propositions on next week�s ballot. Even if they succeed, this would only temporarily reduce the urgency for radical reform; failure would cause intolerable pain. |
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