The Mandatory Constitutional Convention Question Referendum: The New York Experience in National Context
2002; Albany Law School; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0002-4678
Autores Tópico(s)Law, Rights, and Freedoms
ResumoTHE MANDATORY CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION QUESTION REFERENDUM: NO IN NEW YORK IN 1997 Voters expressed little confidence in government; turnout at the polls was consistently abysmal. Legislative elections rarely offered real choices; incumbents almost never lost. Gridlock was the norm in a state legislature that featured the most persistent divided partisan control in the nation. The state budget had not been passed on time in thirteen years. (1) The state personnel was sclerotic. A torturous local government web--a system in name only--diffused accountability and drove up costs. State and local taxes, especially local property taxes, were among the highest in the nation. (2) The result of all this was a state and local service delivery that was expensive, inequitable, and often inadequate. Education is the best example. Mean per pupil education spending was very high. (3) Children in the suburbs were well served, or at least had a fighting chance. But most children--especially minority children in urban centers--were simply not being educated. (4) Yet, when asked in 1997, in the midst of these conditions, to vote on the question Shall there be a convention to revise the constitution and amend the same? New Yorkers responded with a resounding No. The vote was 929,415 in favor of a convention, to 1,579,390 against. (5) Perhaps even more tellingly, a plurality of citizens who came to the polls in that year--1,693,788 of them--simply ignored the question entirely! (6) The idea of holding a convention was rejected even though Governor Mario M. Cuomo had earlier endorsed it as the state's best chance for reform; (7) even though the commission he appointed worked for several years to prepare for it; (8) and even though by the time of the vote virtually every daily newspaper in the state had published an editorial in favor of holding a constitutional convention. (9) The convention question was on the ballot in 1997 because a century-and-a-half earlier (in 1846) a Convention in New York added a constitutional requirement that the question of whether to call a convention be asked every twenty years. (10) The idea for a mandatory convention referendum at regular intervals first appeared in the late eighteenth century in the constitutions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. (11) The Empire State is currently one of fourteen in the United States whose constitutions require the periodic submission of such a question. (12) Perhaps because the idea was included in the Model State Constitution, (13) many of these states adopted the provision relatively recently: Alaska (1956), Connecticut (1965), Hawaii (1950), Illinois (1970), Michigan (1963), Missouri (1945), and Montana (1972). (14) Additionally, Rhode Island added the periodic convention-call provision to its constitution in 1973. (15) One rationale for such provisions is that the sovereign people should have some way of making changes in their governmental structure without having to rely on action by those in statewide and legislative offices, many of whom may be beneficiaries of a flawed status quo. Another is the Jeffersonian view that it is healthy for democracy for each generation to define anew its governing arrangements. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816 that `Each generation [has] ... a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness.... [Al solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be provided by the Constitution.' (16) A third, more conservative reason for these provisions is that periodic convention votes are a way of actually testing public support for political reform ideas, and of simultaneously channeling political energy and avoid[ing] agitation. (17) Such referenda are more likely to confirm the status quo than to result in conventions actually being called, this view holds. New York's failure to authorize a constitutional convention through an automatic convention question referendum is hardly unusual. …
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