A California constitutional convention for all

It was a town hall, certainly, but without the sense of chaos, the hint of danger, that we've come to associate with the words "town hall" in recent weeks. No gun-toting patriots, no dark portents of tyranny. No energy, in fact, at least not at the start of things. It was a blazing July morning, a Saturday, and several hundred people were clustered around tables in a subterranean conference room at USC. They were talking about overthrowing the government, and trying to stay awake. It was taking awhile for the coffee to kick in.

But then everyone forgot about the coffee. At the podium, a speaker began throwing this group of wonkish would-be revolutionaries a few choice bits of rhetorical red meat.

"A small group of extremists can hold the government hostage," he said. Wild applause. "I've always believed that term limits are a function of demagoguery." Cheers. "Proposition 13 has been a sacred cow. But you know, it's time to look at Proposition 13." It brought the house down, in a gentle sort of way.

The speaker was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but it could have been almost any featured guest at any of the town halls conducted across the state by Repair California, the coalition of groups building support for a citizens' convention to scrap and replace the state's Constitution. In this forum, and one the previous night in Santa Monica and at earlier meetings in the Bay Area, most in the crowd were on the same page about what ails California and what has to go: the two-thirds supermajority to adopt a budget, the same supermajority to pass a tax, term limits, rampant special-interest ballot initiatives, Proposition 13, Proposition 8 -- and if you haven't guessed the rest, simply pore over several years' worth of Los Angeles Times editorials. This page has long espoused the reform agenda championed by good-government groups and just-left-of-center editorialists and reformers.

But that spotlights an important, although repairable, flaw in the movement for a convention. People who get excited enough about the minutiae of government to come to meetings and swap ideas are, or so far have been, somewhat self-selecting. They know what's wrong: California's entire anti-government voter revolt of the last 30 years. No matter how vociferously they agree with one another, though, they haven't been able to change the minds of the majority of high-propensity voters who, polling shows, are quite happy with ballot-measure decisions that have enshrined profound skepticism of state government and structural impediments to taxes. If individual challenges to voter-revolt initiatives keep failing, the true believers are hoping that a constitutional convention could wipe them away with one fell swoop.