With a media assist from the Ventura County Star’s Timm Herdt, Tim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, came to Ventura County August 2 to promote Repair California’s plan for calling a state constitutional convention. It seeks to sidestep the legislature’s sole power to convene a constitutional convention by using two constitutional initiatives on the November 2010 ballot. The first would allow a convention to be called by initiative. The second would call a convention, but limit its mandate to four specific topics so as to exclude controversial human rights subjects such as discrimination and abortion.
Wunderman assured the audience that experience in other states proves that a convention
can be trusted to stay within its mandated limits despite some disturbing historical precedents to the contrary. By a selection process still undetermined, he would exclude politicians and experts as delegates. “Plain citizens,” he claims, could avoid the partisan acrimony and career conflicts that produce deadlock. After sufficient education by experts, they could, in a climate of personal respect, resolve problems whose solutions have eluded partisan legislators. But can “plain citizens” wrest power and resources away from dominant vested interests without heated conflict.? Would lobbyists provide the delegates’ education? If not, then who?
A “pro-business” agenda accompanied Wunderman’s call for nonpartisan politics. He would amend but not repeal Proposition 13. Using data that contradicted figures supplied by Timm Herdt and the Legislative Analysts Office, he ranted about “excessive” corporate and personal taxes. While he supports extending term limits and overturning the 2/3 rule for budgets and revenue raising, his own movement would drain resources from concurrent campaigns to make these changes by initiative. Without public campaign financing, what “plain citizen” could be elected as a delegate? Reforms they adopt could not take effect before 2012, too late to help alleviate the current economic crisis. Moreover a conservative judge on the panel warned that “judicial activists” would delay or rule unconstitutional his whole procedure.
Given the magnitude of California’s current crisis, Repair California’s radical alienation from “politics as usual” is understandable. But opting out of partisan politics does not promise to break the deadlock. Wunderman attributes deadlock to partisanship, not to the concentration of the power of money in politics. He overlooks the vehemence that would be released by vested interests under attack. He scapegoats legislators, a majority of whom have voted for “clean money” in a effort to escape dependence on big money. Repair California aims to recruit independents and voters disillusioned with party politics who, by registering “No Party,” forfeit participation in the only effective organizations possible in our winner-take-all-election system. Repair California promises to replace partisan politics, but it expects the same voters who have repeatedly been stampeded by big money media campaigns in the past, using the same old rules, to vote differently this time. This is ultimate California dreaming. Let’s get on with abolishing the 2/3 rule, imposing limits on lobbyists rather than legislators, freeing legislators from the tyranny of constant money raising with clean public money– reforms that are concrete and necessary now. Meanwhile we can study proposals for instant runoff voting and abolition of the state senate as projects for a real convention in the future.
Al Dirrim
