Change – and frustration – are in the air.

Some of the outcry about the compromises in the health care bill that’s likely headed to President Barack Obama’s desk has been directed at the ability of the Republican minority (and some Democratic recalcitrants) to block passage of the legislation through the threat of a filibuster.

The dilemma is mirrored in California, where the will of the majority to fix the broken state has been blocked by the requirement that any state budget be passed by a two-thirds vote. It’s a virtual nonstarter in this era. The notion of bipartisanship championed by Obama – and for that matter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least when he was campaigning – has been replaced by obstructionism and the gaslighting of any ideas supported by the opposite party.

Politics, as usual, has reared it ugly head.

What to do? In Washington, there are renewed calls to consider cutting off the filibustering process through which one senator can throw a monkeywrench into progressive legislation that has taken months to prepare. Ending the longstanding Senate tradition is an intriguing idea, but unlikely to succeed in the short run, given the state of the rest of the universe these days.

MAYBE WHAT’S MOST NEEDED NOW IS MORE PARTISANSHIP, NOT LESS.

Back in California, there’s a growing movement for a new constitutional convention, which organizers hope will qualify for the November 2010 ballot. (See Robin Urevich’s story, p. 8.) Like many think tank ideas, it sounds good on paper, but given the bickering that is endemic to the process, it could end up more like a Pacific Grove City Council meeting than a real-world solution.

Some historical perspective may be in order. In their recent book, Wherever There’s a Fight – How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrant Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California, American Civil Liberties Union activists Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi recall the earliest days of the struggle for freedom in California. The state’s first constitutional convention met in 1849 in Monterey.

“The delegates listed various pre-Gold Rush occupations: the single largest group was lawyers, and there were 11 farmers, eight merchants, three soldiers, and two printers,’’ the authors write. The majority of delegates were miners, including John Sutter and General Mariano Vallejo, California’s “official comandante under Mexican rule.”

Elinson and Yogi note that the forefathers “accomplished quite a bit,” including voting to become a state, not just a territory, and “laid the groundwork for key civil liberties” including “the right to vote to every ‘white male citizen of the United States’ and ‘every white male citizen of Mexican descent’ who opted to become a citizen.” (Lou Dobbs, please take note.)

Slavery was also banned by unanimous vote and a resolution to exclude pre-Civil War free blacks from coming to California was defeated. The new constitution also included the relatively progressive edict that “all property of a wife, whether acquired before or during the marriage, could remain in her name.” (The measure was aimed more at attracting marriageable women to the state than protecting their rights, but it was certainly enlightened by the standards of the time.)

By 1850, California was the first Western state admitted to the union.

“As historian Carey McWilliams noted, ‘When a millionaire knocks on the door,you don’t keep him waiting too long; you let him in,’’’ Elinson and Yogi write.

The remainder of the book (the title is partly taken from Tom Joad’s famous speech in The Grapes of Wrath) chronicles the arduous struggle to preserve freedoms often cast aside in California’s checkered history, from wrongs against Native Americans to the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (and the victimization of Italians in Monterey and San Francisco). The current dispute over the Portola Cross, and the scorn leveled against the ACLU for trying to preserve the basic separation of church and state, is a reminder that preserving freedoms can never be taken for granted.

As for the current host of suggested political reforms: We’ll see.

Schwarzenegger’s recent nomination of State Sen. Abel Maldonado as lieutenant governor may end up mattering more than a hundred commissions. If Maldonado gives up his seat, and a Democrat is elected, the Dems could be within one vote of the two-thirds vote they need to pass a budget. Maybe what’s most needed now is more, and more successful, partisanship – not less.

But if the move for a new constitutional convention qualifies for the ballot this November, we can think of worse places to hold it than here in Monterey.

After all, we’ve been there before.