State Constitutional Convention? No Way!

Assemblyman Brian Kolb recently introduced legislation calling for a constitutional convention to address certain matters. He's been pushing it in newspaper essays around the state. There's a website, full of noble purpose, at www.reformny.org.

Locally, journalist Chris Wilmot pushed the idea in the Smugtown Beacon earlier this week, citing all the right reasons for having a convention.

Convention backers should relax.   A constitutional convention is never, ever going to happen in New York.  At least not in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

That's because to have a convention requires a vote of the state legislature.   The state legislature is the source, the guardian and protector, of all of the problems that make a constitutional convention necessary.   It would never vote away its power to preserve New York's unique and debilitating status quo.

Aristocracies and oligarchies do not cede power voluntarily.  The state legislature is wholly-owned by New York's aristocracy:   public employee unions and a host of other special interest groups forming the core of support for the state Democratic Party.   An aristocracy to which Republicans in Albany, especially the State Senate, have been sucking up for decades.

The rest of the populace works to support the aristocracy, as in feudal times. Which is exactly what New Yorkers do, paying among the highest taxes in the country.

The public employee unions spent millions in anti-convention TV advertising the last time it came up on the ballot in 1997.   They won.

So it comes down to this:   if New York had the kind of legislature that would allow a constitutional convention, we wouldn't need a constitutional convention.   And, conversely, as long as we need a constitutional convention, we'll never get one.

Besides, any constitutional convention the legislature might approve would include current state legislators as delegates, and therefore would be a presumptive fraud.

No.   The only way out for us is for the counties of western New York to coordinate and organize, draw up a plan of self-government, and apply to the federal government for statehood, citing the West Virginia precedent.  

Supporters of such an effort of course will be ridiculed in the traditional media as extremists, for the sin of wanting jobs, and wanting to to live in a place with policies more like the 49 other states.

In any event, the effort would have to wait for a Republican congress.   Because New York is the model of where national Democrats are now trying to drag the rest of the country.   Wanting out of the poisonous brew of New York's state policies is an implicit rebuke to what national Democrats hold dear.

Until this happens, western New York remains, in economic terms, the Cuba of the United States:   a dead economy, frozen in time.