Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket linked to an LATimes opinion piece proposing that California not only hold a Constitutional Convention but that it select the delegates by random draft, much like the jury system. After very briefly summarizing arguments against elected and appointed delegates, Steven Hill wrote:

The Bay Area Council, a group of business leaders, has proposed randomly selecting 400 Californians to create a body of average citizens who could bring their common sense and pragmatism to the problems at hand. Those delegates would be paid to participate for eight months, starting with an intensive two-month education process in which they would hear from many experts about the problems and potential solutions for California.

Steven Hill is a policy director Steve Coll's[1] New America Foundation; it seems to me Hill (and the headline editor) are loosely hinting at an endorsement of The Bay Area Council's scheme. The Bay Area Council is the main organizations headlining efforts to call such a convention--and it is joined by joined both by our Republican Governator and at least one Democratic State Senator (Mark DeSaulnier, who may end up succeeding Ellen Tauscher in Congress), as well as the Los Angeles Times editorial board. This Sacramento Bee column by Dan Walters seems like the best even-handed summary of the idea and the actual mechanics that the Bay Area Council is pushing for.

Robin thought The Bay Area Council's proposal reminded him of Stanford's Deliberative Polling®. I thought it reminded me of the recent creation of the Japanese jury system which Robin had blogged about last November. The Japanese mixture of regular citizens and judges made me wonder if we wouldn't be better served by a constitutional convention that combined the three delegate selection methods Hill describes. Hill dismisses electing the delegates rather quickly:

But if we elect the delegates just as we elect the Legislature, the results likely would mirror a Legislature widely viewed as a failure.

There's a lot of assumptions packed into the "just as we elect" and I was askance at his quick dismissal of the entire notion of elections. That is, after all, what the democratic system is built on, and it's worthwhile to take a moment and meditate on the specific ills of the California legislature before dismissing the entire process. (It struck me slightly akin to a doctor advising a widow to date robots: "if you marry another human being they might get sick and die! Humans do that!") As the Wikipedia entry helpfully reminds us, the California Legislature is currently bound by the unusual requirement for a 2/3 majority in budgetary votes. Changing this is the most specific and obvious aim of the convention, and while the convention itself should probably require a 2/3 majority, there are other ways to make sure we don't get sucked into gridlock. The state representatives are usually elected from a party vs. party race, post primary, often making the dominant party primary the deciding election and shutting out moderates---we could instead hold a single, competitive election in each district. (Maybe use instant run off?) The state assembly members can have up to 6 years of incumbency and state senate members have up to 8 years; a simple requirement that the constitutional delegates can't have served in elected office in the last 15 years would bring in plenty of new blood. There are lots of possibilities.

I am innately suspicious of adopting The Bay Area Council's proposed procedure for a few reasosn. First of all, I'm just skeptical that their interests would be perfectly aligned with mine, the state as a whole, or the future state as a whole. Since they've had money and time and brains to throw at the problem, they're more likely to have picked a procedure perfectly aligned with their interests than with mine, the state's population, or the state's future population. Secondly, I am very suspicious of the leave-Prop-13-alone bit that Dan Walter's column cites as being part of their proposal. Why that proposition above all others? By definition it is biased towards benefitting the owners of quickly appreciating properties, the more previously purchased the better. There's a lot of timeline evidence that it has led to California's steady decline. Thirdly, I have my own concerns about the California system that The Bay Area Council does not seem to be addressing. One of them is my desire that California's public education system be reinstated to some fraction of its former glory, a great churning engine of upward mobility and creatitivity, with the three tiered higher education system (community colleges, state universities, and the Univesity of California) being able to have a more stable and sustaining fiscal structure. The second is my desire that making sure that a minority can't have its rights taken away by a scant majority. The third is my desire to make the management of California's environment more transparent. I am interested in finding organizations, groups and thinkers who are probably more aligned with my interests than The Bay Area Business Council. Please help me if you can!

[1] Did you know journalist Steve Coll had founded such a large policy organization? I had no idea!