While sight-seeing in Monterey recently, I happened to visit
Colton Hall where California’s first state constitution was
drafted. Forty-eight delegates met in this stately structure for a
constitutional convention commencing at noon on Sept. 1, 1849
– exactly 160 years ago this Tuesday.
While sight-seeing in Monterey recently, I happened to visit Colton Hall where California’s first state constitution was drafted. Forty-eight delegates met in this stately structure for a constitutional convention commencing at noon on Sept. 1, 1849 – exactly 160 years ago this Tuesday.
Colton Hall is often overlooked by tourists in Monterey, but it played an important role in California’s early state history. As I strolled around the display tables and closely studied facsimiles of the handwritten documents scribbled down during that time, I imagined how intense the debate must have grown as delegates decided how the new state government would be administered.
Many of the most eminent men on the West Coast met here to draft the document. In my mind’s eye, I saw them working late into the night lit by the flicker of tallow candles. Every so often, they jetted tobacco juice from their mouths into brass spittoons while passionately arguing details. As they talked, quill pens scrawled on parchment the rules and regulations establishing the fundamental legislation of the soon-to-be American state of California.
That first state constitution was adopted by citizens in November 1849. It lasted for 30 years. It was superseded in May 1879 when voters ratified a brand-new constitution. The corruption of Sacramento legislators manipulated by the powerful railroad lobby required a major overhaul of our constitution to safeguard the checks and balances of political power in the state capitol.
The Progressive Era marked a period of extreme mistrust of elected officials. That is why the framers of the state’s second constitution devised a document that would place more political control into citizens’ hands by empowering them to amend the constitution through means of ballot-box initiatives and referendums.
Despite the good intentions for political purity that went into creating California’s constitution of 1879, this document came with its own Pandora’s box of problems. Over time, California’s second constitution was amended or revised more than 500 times. It became so bloated that by 1962, it contained more than 75,000 words.
Currently, California has the dubious claim to fame of having the third longest constitution in the world – after Alabama and India. It has evolved into such a messy mishmash of laws and legislation affixed into it over the decades that one political pundit has described California’s most fundamental government document as “the perfect example of what a constitution ought not to be.”
Today, California faces an acute crisis in the management of its government and financial resources. A huge part of the problem – perhaps the single most sizeable factor – is the highly counter-productive condition of our state’s present-day constitution.
The Golden State is ungovernable. Our public schools, once America’s best, are now among the nation’s worst. Our prisons are so overcrowded that riots inside them are now becoming frequent occurrences. Our roads and highways infrastructure and water distribution systems are steadily deteriorating from lack of adequate maintenance.
Our legislators year after year perform a Sisyphus task of fruitlessly trying to get the state’s finances in order. They face a severe administration handicap written into the constitution of meeting a two-thirds vote requirement to pass the budget and raise taxes. Sacramento will remain trapped in its morass of legislative futility as long as legislators continue to use a state constitution overloaded with a jumble of decrees that go against common sense and the public good.
Luckily, citizens of our state are starting to see the trouble with our current convoluted constitution. A movement is now under way to chuck it out and dramatically reform our state government with a brand-new and straightforward document designed to give legislators the means to provide more effective service to the people they represent.
Called Repair California, this movement was started in our region by the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored, public-policy advocacy organization based in San Francisco. The group plans to put two initiatives on the ballot in 2010. One would provide an amendment to California’s constitution that would enable voters to call for a constitutional convention by initiative. The other initiative would actually call for a limited convention that would devise a new state constitution for California.
I have a hunch that Repair California’s efforts will prove successful in instigating a convention for a new state constitution. Californians are frustrated with how Sacramento leaders are failing to effectively manage the state. We need to rewrite the rules of running our government in order to achieve productive results from law-makers.
If voters next year give the go-ahead to Repair California’s plan, I’ll make a return visit to Monterey’s Colton Hall. In that great chamber where our state’s first constitution was conceived, I’ll give a nod to California’s spirit of new beginnings that inspired that document. Our state needs a new beginning – and a new and improved constitution will give us one.
