I like Rob Teplitz, but some of these government reform ideas are really bad, in particular a Constitutional Convention.
The main change I want to make to the PA Constitution is legalizing a progressive rate structure for the income tax. How progressive or regressive the income tax is should be a political choice, not something that’s written into the long-term rules of state government. I would also like to see a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing marriage equality.
But is there anything else liberals want to change about the PA Constitution?
Nothing else really comes to mind, and I think those two changes could eventually get passed through the normal, admittedly arduous, process of amending the Constitution if we start laying the groundwork soon - passing the amendments in two consecutive legislative sessions, and then winning a ballot referendum.
What I’m afraid of is that if you open up the whole Constitution for a rewrite, right-wing politicians would get their way on a lot of bad ideas that would make the Constitution worse than it is now - term limits for legislators, more ballot initiatives and referenda, supermajority requirements for tax increases, TABOR and other ugly stuff that would turn PA into an ungovernable mess like California.
What do you guys think? Any bad stuff in the current Constitution that I’m missing? Anything new you’d like to see in there?
What’s wrong with term limits?
Term limits are a last resort when elections are uncompetitive. Nobody’s shown that the accountability mechanism of elections has broken down. Reps who run afoul of the voters still get voted out pretty often. If elections are still reasonably competitive, I don’t see any reason to take away voters’ option to keep reelecting the same rep if they’re happy with him/her.
Thanks for your comments. My plan is for a constitutional convention focused on government reform. To explain and simplify a bit, when the convention is authorized, it can be limited to certain subjects so that we don’t open Pandora’s Box via the convention. But the reason that a convention is needed is because the legislators haven’t shown their own sufficient and demonstrable commitment to reform — so we need to get the public directly involved. It’s been over 40 years since that occurred, but the 1968 convention is the one that gave us the modern Auditor General, Treasurer, and other reforms, so I’m confident that it can be done. I’d be very interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on this, either here or by contacting us directly via our website, http://www.robteplitz.com.
Yeah, but Rob the scope of the convention is going to be determined by the legislators who are in power at the time, and maybe a majority of them will want to open Pandora’s box of ballot initiatives and capped tax increases. There’s no guarantee we won’t end up with a way more rightwing Constitution.
I don’t know that there’s really anything wrong with the state Constitution that we need to have a convention. What else do we want to do to the state Constitution besides progressive income tax and marriage equality? It’s not clear to me that there’s a need for a big rewrite.
Term limits limit choices. Plus, the problems they are supposed to fix never get fixed. It’s merely smoke and mirrors and feel good politics for those people who complain about government but have no clue how it works.