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Californians Split on Constitutional Reform
New America Media, News Report, by Edwin Okong'o
October 31, 2009
Photo by Linda Cicero
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Latinos and Asian Americans are less dissatisfied with the process of putting initiatives on the ballot and are less eager to change California's constitution to restrict direct democracy than whites and African-Americans, says a poll from the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.
Presenting poll findings recently at a conference about reforming California’s constitution held at the Sacramento Convention Center, Tammy Frisby, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said the poll showed differences between what she called the fast-growing “new California” voters and the shrinking “old California” voters.
“There is an interesting divide in what we term new California and old California,” said Frisby. “What we mean by that is that the traditionally largest groups of the California population – whites and African Americans – have different views than new Californians, that is the fastest growing segment of our population, Latinos and Asian Americans.”
Frisby said the poll found that new Californians were not as pessimistic about the direction of the state. Only 57 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans thought the state was moving in the wrong direction, compared to 64 percent of whites and African Americans. Latinos and Asians were also more likely to say that they were not dissatisfied with the initiative process.
But there was concern from some attendees that because the poll of about 1,000 Californians was conducted in English only and via the Internet, the sample did not accurately represent California.
“Where are the Latinos?” one man asked.
Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Field Poll, said it was difficult to find funding for multilingual polls. DiCamillo said Field and New America Media were proposing to poll non-English speaking California voters in 2010. The polls would be conducted in some Asian languages and would over-sample certain Asian populations, such as Chinese and Vietnamese voters, DiCamillo said.
“We recognize the growing importance of the diversity of California and we’d like to measure it and bring a little more clarity and provide [ethnic media] reporters across the states with information particular to their communities,” DiCamillo said.
Frisby agreed that getting opinions from people in ethnic communities was a challenge.
“Everyone is really, really hungry for it,” she said. “The high level of uncertainty among Asian Americans could be due to some language issues. Ithink it would be reasonable to say that there are language barriers.”
Frisby said anyone thinking about having ethnic communities involved in the process should think about the media people from those communities access.
“As those agents of reform debate how to reach out to people in this campaign, you're going to have to think about using the new media in a new way, certainly exploring what’s going on out there in the different kinds of media that old and new California are accessing,” Frisby said.
During a session about the history of California constitutional reform, Amy Bridges, a political science professor and adjunct professor of history at UC San Diego, asked constitutional reform advocates to be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past in California and elsewhere.
“In every constitution I have read, there is workers’ resentment of the Chinese – there was a desire to control issues of Chinese employment,” Bridges said. “In Arizona, there was much more resentment of and a desire for prohibition of Mexicans because Mexicans from Sonora County were very able miners.”
She said most of the conventions worked out some compromises around these issues. None of the conventions enacted provisions against hiring Mexicans.
“We, of course, passed many anti-Chinese provisions, all of which were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court – not our highest moment,” Bridges said. “We had more Chinese residents than other states – that’s probably part of it.”
Albert Fong, 66, is the son of Chinese immigrants and one of the few people of color at the convention. Fong, a 30-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service, said immigrants tend to stay away from politics, sometimes because of experiences in their home country.
Fong said he regretted not having been interested in politics earlier. But he said he was on several e-mail lists, including the Institute of California Studies at Sacramento State, one of the organizers of the conference.
“I seek it out,” Fong said. “I keep abreast with things that have to do with governance, because that goes back to what we’re gonna get. We are the ones who suffer from whatever policy they implement.”
Bicoastal constitutional conundrum:
California has what New York wants; New York tried the constitutional convention some propose for California
October 13, 2009 Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times
by Thad Kousser, Director of Bill Lane Center for the American West's California Constitutional Reform Project
The nation's two mega-states are poised to embark on constitutional experiments of a scale not seen since Philadelphia in 1787. Prominent New York leaders want to call a convention to enact term limits, an unfettered initiative process and a limit on the legislature's ability to raise taxes. Guess what? Californians have been there, done that and lived to regret it. Current calls for reform in California focus on exactly the opposite: loosening term limits, restraining the initiative process and giving a simple majority of legislators the ability to raise taxes.
So here's a proposal that could save both states the time, expense and uncertainty of holding constitutional conventions: Let's swap constitutions. We could try it for five years, just to see if the governmental grass really is greener on the other side of the country.
If constitutional swapping sounds too much like an unfortunate new offering from Fox's fall TV lineup, the two states could instead learn the obvious lessons from their mirror-image political movements. First, things can always get worse, and not every reform will be for the better. And second, every solution can bring unanticipated consequences, especially if states don't learn from each other. So rather than have to say, "We told you so," may we offer New York a few painful lessons that we've learned out West?
Term limits have put an end to political sinecures and have helped to elect a Legislature that looks more like the rest of California. But they have also notoriously weakened the legislative branch. They have ensured that the leaders who wrote California's budgets in the boom years could rest assured that they would be out of power and no longer accountable in the bust years. This kind of political moral hazard is among the major reasons that California is now saddled with massive deficits.
Similarly, a plethora of well-intentioned initiatives have written checks that elected officials could not cash because initiatives are not required to identify a funding source. And the requirement that all tax bills pass with a two-thirds supermajority chronically paralyzes the Legislature at budget time, and robs it of the flexibility to deal with recessions by balancing spending cuts with tax increases, even when most voters want this.
What New York teaches California, in turn, is that a constitutional convention can fail to achieve any reform at all, as happened in the Empire State in 1967. New Yorkers called a convention charged with reapportioning the state's legislative districts, but the debate quickly expanded into bitter fights over welfare policy, state funding of religious schools and racial discrimination in education. Voters split along partisan and geographic lines when convention delegates presented them with an omnibus package of proposed constitutional changes, and they rejected it at the polls.
California cannot afford to waste this moment of reform by failing to learn the lessons of New York. That is why scholars and political practitioners from New York and across the country are coming to Sacramento to inform California's constitutional debate at an Oct. 14 conference, jointly convened by Stanford, UC Berkeley and Sacramento State and to be broadcast on the California Channel.
Changing a state constitution looks easy. Unlike the U.S. Constitution -- which has been amended only 17 times since the Bill of Rights was passed in 1789 -- most states' constitution writers expected their foundational documents to be altered frequently. Californians have overdone it, amending the state Constitution more than 500 times in the last 100 years via citizen initiatives and through measures put on the ballot by the Legislature. We are now poised to scrap the whole patchwork mess -- longer than any national constitution, save India's -- and start over by holding a constitutional convention, just as many in New York are proposing.
Both states should look to history, and to each other, as they take up their respective tasks. Start with Philadelphia in 1787. The genius of the Constitutional Convention was that it combined democratic innovation with a close look at what had succeeded and, just as important, what had failed in other democracies. The delegates were keenly aware of the strengths and flaws in Britain's constitutional monarchy, in their own Articles of Confederation and in the several Colonial charters under which many of them had served. They were serious students of Athenian and Roman governments and even drew from the Holy Roman Empire. They carefully debated what to emulate and what to avoid.
As Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined, "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single, courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experimentation without risk to the rest of the country."The trouble is, the genius of this system only works if states actually examine whether each other's experiments were successful or not.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
Thad Kousser is a visiting associate professor of political science at Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the American West and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. You can read more about the October 14 "Getting to Reform" conference and our Policy Papers on constitutional reform here.Risser Prize for Environmental Journalism 2009 Winners Announced!
Hal Bernton, Justin Mayo and Steve Ringman won the $5,000 prize for their two-part series, "Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong," published in the Seattle Times. Their work demonstrated how heavy logging in southwestern Washington had accounted for a significant proportion of landslides in the region. A discussion forum and Prize presentation event at Stanford University is planned for January 2010. The forum will be hosted by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford. Click here for more information about the journalists and the prize.
"Following Muir’s Footsteps: A graduate student traces the legendary naturalist’s path in search of new approaches to conservation."
By Katherine Bagley/Photography by Alex McInturff, Audubon Magazine
Risser Prize 2008 Forum: Climate change heralds wildfires, rising waters: Stanford panel cites local impacts of global warming
Thursday, December 4, 2008, by Chris Kenrick, Palo Alto Online Staff
Revisiting John Muir's legacy
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Sunday, November 2, 2008, by Jon Christensen
Bi-Cultural Life on the US/Mexico Border
The Bill Lane Center hosted a film screening and panel discussion about the construction of the Border Wall featuring the short documentary "Frontier Youth."
How the West Has Won - Can the West Lead Us to a Better Place?
By Bill Lane Center Co-Director David M. Kennedy
Walk the Farm 2008: Stanford Waterways, April 26, 2008
April 2008, Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West Walks the Farm in Search of Water
