One Cheer for the Con-Con

Abstract

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Commentary One Cheer for the Con-Con Peter Schrag* formerly with the Sacramento Bee As the old cliche goes, in politics you can’t beat some- thing with nothing. So even though the proposal for a con- stitutional convention is flawed—and while it involves all sorts of imponderables—absent a decent third alternative, it seems to be either the con-con or the continuation of an unacceptable status quo. A convention at least has a chance of bringing home to the delegates and, just pos- sibly, to many other Californians, both the seriousness and the complexity of the state’s dysfunctional governmental structure. There are no recent models of successful state consti- tutional conventions and there is always the fear of a run- away convention getting into divisive social issues and/or www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 2, Issue 2, 2010 ignoring the complex structural problems that its backers hope to address. In the case of the proposal now being sponsored by the Bay Area Council, there’s also an equal but opposite danger. In a bow to what its sponsors imagine is an immu- table and rigid antitax orthodoxy, the initiative prohibits the delegates from including any “new language, or alter(ing) existing language, that directly imposes or reduces any taxes or fees; sets the frequency at which real property is assessed or re-assessed; or defines change in ownership as it relates to any tax or fee.” What that means is that Proposition 13, probably the most severe constitutional constraint on legislative discretion and on local government—and thus on representative democracy —would remain untouchable. Its perpetuation would set the hopeless muddling of state and local authority, and thus of * Peter Schrag is the retired editorial page editor of the Sacramen- to Bee and the author, most recently, of California: America’s High Stakes Experiment (2006). His forthcoming book, “Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration,” will be published by the Univer- sity of California Press in the spring.