I clicked on the press release and I see who is behind this. Obviously they put this up in a hurry because there's no intro unless you read the press release.

I don't know what good the petition is--I think mainly it's a vehicle for building a mailing list for the fight to come. I'm not sure I like the approach--using some nebulous petition with no text to sign people up. But this is the group Feinstein and Boxer have endorsed and it's got some heavy hitters involved. The PR guys are known Dem. players.

But it doesn't really say what's ahead. So far as I know, any "petition" is pretty much worthless--there's nobody to petition, unless we're hitting up Secretary of State Deborah Bowen and Attorney General Jerry Brown to try and declare it unconstitutional. But I haven't seen any competent analysis that they can actually do that.

The problem is that the US Constitution says that the state legislatures shall establish how their state's electors shall be selected and this is a citizen initiative. A popular vote is not the same as the legislature deciding.

The rethugs are gathering their signatures. If they succeed and get it certified, it goes on the ballot. Then we mount the advertising campaign to defeat it. This will take a lot of money and people on the ground. It will most likely coincide with the primary election.

By all means people should support this and work to defeat it, but it looks like this so-called "petition" is just a means to build a mailing list. I would have preferred it if they were more up-front about it.