California ponders changes in constitution: "SAN CARLOS, Calif. (AP) - Fed up with the budget crises and partisan battles that have paralyzed California for years, some influential voices believe it's time to tear open the state constitution and start anew.
Once dismissed as a hokey gimmick, support for a proposed constitutional convention has been building in the nation's most populous state. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has indicated he would back an effort to retool the document to make state government function more smoothly."
-----------------
"Function more smoothly" can have many meanings. The organizers of this effort have their own agenda, but you never know where a constitutional convention can lead. The US constitutional convention began as a meeting to propose some amendments to the Articles of Confederation that were to be ratified by unanimous consent of all 13 state legislatures, according to the Articles. The first thing the delegates did was toss the Articles in the trash and start over. The final document was submitted for ratification by special conventions, not state legislatures, and would go into effect as soon as nine state conventions ratified it. So the moral of the story has to be that there is no way to guarantee that a constitutional convention will content itself with "retooling" your existing system.
No comments:
Post a Comment