Something I’ve been hearing recently that used to just never come up in polite conversation is a constitutional convention to overhaul California’s founding legal document. The Golden State’s constitution has been so severely modified over the 130 or so years since its last overhaul that it requires a search engine to consume the darned thing.
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 18 AMENDING AND REVISING THE CONSTITUTIONSEC. 4. A proposed amendment or revision shall be submitted to the
electors and if approved by a majority of votes thereon takes effect
the day after the election unless the measure provides otherwise. If
provisions of 2 or more measures approved at the same election
conflict, those of the measure receiving the highest affirmative vote
shall prevail.
This means that 50% plus one voters during a primary election (when very few people show up to the polls) can trump the Governor, Assembly, Senate, and State Supreme Court. This is all very democratic, of course, but also leaves a nasty situation when a poorly-conceived proposition goes through that seemed like a good idea at the time. Compare this process to that used for the United States Constitution, which sets a much higher bar, and has only resulted in a couple of totally boneheaded revisions.
Our legislators complain that their hands are tied by too many spending formulae, leaving only a handful of big-ticket items in the budget to fiddle with. A couple of examples of government reveue sources that are strictly limited in their reallocation off the top of my head:
- Property taxes
- Tobacco taxes
- Vehicle licensing fees
- Gasoline taxes
- Lottery revenue
I propose that we cut them loose. Drop the restrictions on what kinds of government revenue can be put to what purposes and let our legislators legislate. If they do poorly, their challengers in the next election have a stronger argument that we should kick the bums out.
Since we can’t count on the critters in Sacramento to call for a constitutional convention on a 2/3rds vote as currently required, we introduce a ballot proposition to introduce a provision allowing for constitutional convention by popular referrendum. Put said popular refferendum on the same ballot as a separate measure and let the ad war begin!
Who’s with me?
I think these restrictions are easily bypassed by politicians anyway i.e. in MO some of the gambling revenues have to go to schools, they can’t change that, but they can decrease original school financing so schools didn’t get any more money than before.
We kinda put a finger in that dike back in 1988 by ballot refferendum (the old prop 98, as opposed to the emminent domain one recently). The most recent credible number I saw put “mandatory” spending at just over 60% of the total revenue spent in 2003, including k-12 education spending locked in by Prop 98, which takes a large percentage of whatever slush would otherwise have been available and dedicates it to primary education (and guarantees that the education budget always grows). Basically my point is that there’s a lot of money being pumped through state bureaucracies that our congress-critters can’t really put in play.
Other steps that should be considered would be suspending any state programs mandated by but not fully paid for by the federal government. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of thing politicians don’t have the stones to actually do.