All the talk about a Constitutional Convention reminds me of a con game.  Whatever your problem, the Con Con will fix it.  You want balanced budgets, come to the convention.  You want to repeal Prop. 13, come to the convention.  You want to redefine marriage, come to the convention.  You want to make chocolate without calories, come to the convention.

For example, the California League of Cities, the California School Boards Association and the California Association of Counties have called a governance summit next month that may very well result in their calling for a Constitutional Convention.  On the surface of it, I agree with these local elected officials seeking a discussion of how to restore local control. Addressing that issue would get to the crux of much of what has gone wrong with California in recent decades.  I even agree with the statement by the LA Times’ George Skelton about the need to: "reconstruct the tangled, unhealthy relationship between the state and local governments."

The city council members, school board trustees and county supervisors are for rolling back state mandates, which the Governor spoke in favor of in his speech last week. However, Skelton and, I suspect, many of those local electeds who will participate in the governance summit believe the solution is to allow cities, school districts and counties to raise taxes more easily or simply label every revenue source a "fee" instead of a "tax."  That way, local governments can get on with providing all the services they do now, plus give out all the other goodies the state does, and perhaps even more. 

If making it easier to impose tax hikes (by any name) by local governments is the best we can get out of leaders calling for "reform," then a Constitutional Convention will be a disaster.  It would mean that our leaders have fundamentally misunderstood what the average California taxpayer is saying, which is: stop the madness.  Our government cannot be everything to everyone.  Government is trying to do too much and is failing at even those basic things we expect and need it to do, much less at those things that are far beyond a bureaucracy’s ability to accomplish. 

A discussion of that could make for a solid Constitutional Convention and could lead to a true restructuring of governance that could make for a better, stronger California.  Call me a skeptic, but I do not believe that is what we will get out of Constitutional Convention.  Obviously, a Convention could never please everybody, but we run the great chance that it will take away freedoms and protections we now enjoy.  I know there is low support for the Legislature, but rather than re-writing the Constitution to make legislators better, we should try using the election process to elect better legislators or re-educate the existing ones.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.