The case for a convention

One week ago, we introduced you to the Cassandras who claim, against all evidence, that OKing a constitutional convention will mean the end of all that is good and holy in New York. Today we begin making the affirmative case for doing some surgery on the state Constitution. In a state where politicians and criminals are often the same, it starts with ethics reform.

Government in Albany is broken and nothing shows it more than the federal criminal trials of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos, once the boss men of the Legislature.

The very ones who benefit from the system — the Democrats who control the Assembly and the Republicans who control the Senate — will, by definition, never change it. The people must therefore go around the bums. A constitutional convention would elect 15 delegates statewide and three per state Senate district next year, and convene in 2019 to review and examine the Constitution and present proposed changes to the voters for their up or down. The list of urgent changes is long. Term limits could finally force out incumbents who, in obnoxiously gerrymandered districts, choose their voters — and generally serve as long as they like, almost never losing an election.

Fair, nonpartisan redistricting would help solve the same problem.

Limits on the huge campaign contributions politicians can accept — $65,000 for statewide offices multiplied ad infinitum for limited liability companies — would curb the ability of the wealthiest people to buy influence.

Rank-and-file legislators could finally be treated like grownups, rather than being subjected to humiliating boss rule, which makes a mockery out of representative democracy.

Voters could at long last consider whether, in 2017, it’s time to abandon the fiction that senators and Assembly members are humble citizenlegislators — and formally make the Legislature a full time job, like Congress is, with almost no compromising outside income allowed.

All of these improvements the Legislature can, in theory, adopt either through statute or by amending the Constitution. But nothing that democratizes the process or threatens the power of the bosses has any chance in Albany of getting through.

The anti-con con forces claim that it’s dangerous to crack open the whole Constitution; better, they say, to amend the document piecemeal.

It’s true the state Constitution has been amended more than 200 times in one-off changes, by act of the Legislature and agreement of the electorate.

But those have almost all been tiny nips and tucks, like Question No. 3 this year, about bike trails in state forests. Indeed, the bosses cynically placed on the ballot this year another ballot item, Question No. 2, a constitutional amendment to strip pensions from public officials convicted of corruption felonies.

Worthy, but it’s there to distract from the rampant criminality in the Legislature and the necessity of the constitutional convention. Vote yes on Questions 2, 3 — and most of all, Question 1.

With the whole damn system out of order, a constitutional convention is the only way out.