The reasons why California voters, or at least the 4-plus million of them who voted, rejected five budget-related ballot measures last week appear to vary widely.
The major measures lost in every California county, from the most liberal to the most conservative, indicating that the only real overriding issue for voters was disgust with business-as-usual in the Capitol and anger at the state's political leaders, albeit for differing reasons.
Given that anger and disgust, are Californians willing to take a leap into the political unknown and entertain some potentially major changes in the political system through a constitutional convention, the first in more than 130 years?
One day after the election, the Bay Area Council, a collection of corporate executives, formally launched its long-pending campaign to place two measures on the 2010 ballot, one authorizing voters to call such a convention directly, without legislative action, and the second to call such a convention.
The second measure would choose 400 Californians, more or less at random, to serve as "citizen delegates" and empower them to study governance, election processes, and the budget system and recommend changes for ratification by voters, presumably in 2012. The delegates could not, however, directly change state and local taxes – and specifically not Proposition 13, the property tax limit enacted by voters in 1978.
The Bay Area Council will give the Legislature a chance to move on a constitutional overhaul, but if it fails to act, an initiative signature drive will be launched to place the two measures on the 2010 ballot.
That California has become governmentally dysfunctional has become, in the last couple of years, conventional wisdom, largely due to the perpetual budget crisis. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has described it as a broken system and endorsed, conceptually, a constitutional convention.
Whether such a convention could materially improve governance, however, is still an open question. Its 400 politically unsophisticated delegates could become bogged down in the same ideological and factional conflicts that prevent the Legislature from being effective. Special interests, especially those favoring the status quo, could hold sway and we could wind up with cures that are worse than the civic disease.
That said, we have no other options for the fundamental reform that we so sorely need. Piecemeal initiative measures can only go so far. Only a convention – or a constitutional revision commission – could make the deep systemic changes that California needs to have a government that can function effectively and responsively to its many issues, and give Californians the accountability that's so lacking in our pass-the-buck system.
The alternative to taking this leap into the political unknown is to maintain an unworkable status quo and descend even further into the corrosive political tribalism that now permeates the Capitol.
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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