Thursday, June 25, 2009

California Constitutional Convention?

A group of CEO's and Bay Area business leaders are directing and funding an effort to call a California Constitutional Convention to write a new constitution.

If you want the details they are here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1auuIQFFME

They have an agenda. For example, they would exclude the consideration of repeal of the 2/3 rules for passing budgets and taxes and they would "select" the delegates, not elect the delegates, to get "average" citizens.

From the Bee Capitol Alert: Dan Walters
The council's draft language for a 2010 ballot measure to call a constitutional convention specifically says it cannot mess with Proposition 13 but that, Capitol Weekly said, has not mollified those on the right.

Today, the council's chief spokesman, John Grubb, said the article implied that it had stopped work on the convention and "This is absolutely not true and we have requested an immediate correction."

The article doesn't say that the council has halted work on the convention, but Grubb apparently is concerned about its effect on organizational work.

"The Bay Area Council is in the process of creating an open, transparent process to determine what goes into the convention," Grubb said in an email to journalists. "This will involve gathering between 50 and 100 of the state's top political and academic experts to help determine what questions the delegates should answer in a limited constitutional convention. Somehow gathering these experts (rather than the Bay Area Council itself determining what should or shouldn't be in the convention) was interpreted to mean that we were trying to "offload" the whole effort. Wrong

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