| After a year of public discussion and behind-closed-doors drafting, the Bay Area Council has filed their two initiatives for the November 2010 ballot to allow Californians to call a Constitutional Convention.
The first and fairly noncontroversial initiative would change the existing constitution to allow voters to themselves call a convention. Currently only the legislature can do so.
The second initiative is the biggie, the one that actually convenes the convention and lays out how it operates, including how delegates would be picked and what the scope would be.
The delegate selection process would be as follows: 3 delegates randomly selected from each AD (total of 240) and delegates selected by county Boards of Supervisors, one delegate per every 175,000 in a given county, with cities of over 1 million (currently LA and SD, maybe San Jose) get to pick some of their county's delegates. Federally-recognized Indian tribes get to send a total of 4 delegates (they decide themselves who the 4 will be). This is interesting, since tribes' primary relationship with with the federal government, and states are very strictly limited from regulating tribal affairs or lands. Still, better to have them in the process than outside it, especially since they were banned from the 1849 and 1879 conventions.
Significantly, all delegates must be citizens. Permanent residents are not eligible to participate. There are a series of other restrictions designed to keep political insiders out of the convention - rules that exclude yours truly (since I serve on a party central committee), but those are much less problematic than the exclusion of California's considerable non-citizen population.
Preliminary analysis offered to me by Gus Ayer over email, which I hope he'll share in the comments, indicates that this structure would be highly likely to produce a delegate body that is right of center. California's large-population counties tend to be in Southern California and have Boards of Supervisors dominated by Republicans.
The convention's scope is also interesting, and skewed toward the right. Have a look at the language on "Government Effectiveness," included as one of four items the Convention MUST consider (along with "Elections and Reduction of Special Interest Influence," "Spending and Budgeting" and "Governance"):
Government Effectiveness, including a method for periodically reviewing each State agency, department, board and commission to determine whether it is performing its functions to meet the needs of the people of the State and whether it should have its enabling legislation modified, be merged into another new or existing entity, or cease to exist.
The convention it would also be barred from altering existing constitutional language regarding taxes (including but not limited to Prop 13) if there's any chance that the alteration "changes the fundamental nature of" the tax or might cause the tax to rise. In his response to my question during last week's live interview on Calitics, Gavin Newsom said Prop 13 should be part of a Con-Con.
The initiative also proposes to limit the scope of the convention in this way:
the convention may not include new language, or alter existing language, directly affecting marriage or abortion rights, gambling or casinos of any type, affirmative action, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, immigration rights, or the death penalty.
I don't know if they simply forgot to include "freedom of speech" or the state's Equal Rights Amendment or any number of other elements that make our state's Bill of Rights far, far stronger than the federal bill of rights, or if they deliberately want that to be altered. (Businesses have never been very happy with the Pruneyard decision, which used the state's freedom of speech constitutional language to extend many speech rights onto private property, specifically shopping centers.)
Needless to say, this is not how I would have written a Con-Con initiative.
UPDATE by Robert: Joe Mathews offers his take on the initiatives, noting that the FPPC will be in charge of the Convention, picking the staff and training the delegates. He also points out that the "clerk" of the convention will be an extremely important role, could be anybody, and can only be fired by a 2/3rds vote of the Convention. |
