Can CA rewrite its Constitution?
source: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz0WZvTZEeO
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- fountaingoats
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This essay is not exactly new - it was published earlier this year - but it's a great read. Some excerpts, though I encourage you to skip these bits and read them along with the rest of the piece at the link:
California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.
California’s constitution, with its five hundred or so amendments, is so long that its full text would occupy every line of the magazine you are holding. Thanks largely to initiatives, many of them well intentioned, it is also wildly at odds with itself. It contains so many set-asides and mandates that the legislature can control only about seven per cent of the state budget even when it deigns to pass one. But California’s nemesis could soon become its salvation. Something remarkable is beginning to happen.
It started almost exactly one year ago, modestly enough, with an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Echoing Jefferson, the author, Jim Wunderman, wrote, “It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. Therefore, are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” He then called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do the nullifying and the instituting. Wunderman heads the Bay Area Council, a business group not normally considered part of the vanguard of the revolution. (Its board consists of C.E.O.s and other executives from companies like Bank of America, McKinsey & Company, Chevron, Google, United Airlines, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.) But Wunderman’s op-ed manifesto engendered a broad response, and the response has engendered something like a movement.
Read the full piece: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz0...
California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.
California’s constitution, with its five hundred or so amendments, is so long that its full text would occupy every line of the magazine you are holding. Thanks largely to initiatives, many of them well intentioned, it is also wildly at odds with itself. It contains so many set-asides and mandates that the legislature can control only about seven per cent of the state budget even when it deigns to pass one. But California’s nemesis could soon become its salvation. Something remarkable is beginning to happen.
It started almost exactly one year ago, modestly enough, with an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Echoing Jefferson, the author, Jim Wunderman, wrote, “It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. Therefore, are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” He then called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do the nullifying and the instituting. Wunderman heads the Bay Area Council, a business group not normally considered part of the vanguard of the revolution. (Its board consists of C.E.O.s and other executives from companies like Bank of America, McKinsey & Company, Chevron, Google, United Airlines, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.) But Wunderman’s op-ed manifesto engendered a broad response, and the response has engendered something like a movement.
Read the full piece: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz0...
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- California Constitution
