Opinion: What California, New York can learn from one another - San Jose Mercury News:
"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 this week to inform California's constitutional debate at a conference, jointly convened by Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley and Sacramento State University and to be broadcast on the California Channel."
"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 this week to inform California's constitutional debate at a conference, jointly convened by Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley and Sacramento State University and to be broadcast on the California Channel."
