At the Kids Vote dinner, a woman asked me if I knew the difference between an initiative and a referendum. I had some vague notion that one was initiated by the legislature and the other initiated by voter’s petitions. What I hadn’t spent much time thinking about was the impact of voter sponsored legislation.
Yesterday the Colorado Supreme Court threw out an initiative, which amended the Colorado State Constitution (Amendment 54.) The court said that the initiative was in violation of the Constitution, despite it being passed with 51% of votes cast in favor.
At the League of Women Voters legislative coffee last Saturday, the same woman who challenged me asked Josh Penry about his bill to reorganize government. Penry indicated that his proposal to revamp government is “probably too grand of a proposal,” but that it should be more difficult to change Colorado’s constitution. His suggestion was that any constitutional amendment be passed twice. The first passage would refer an initiative to the legislature, where it would be debated and corrected for any “unintended consequences,” then referred back to the voters for final approval. Penry felt that bills suffered when there was “no roughing up in the legislature.”
Penry even offered an alternative to the two-times-passage—passage by a super majority. That would be similar to how the US Constitution is amended. Any amendment must be ratified by 2/3 of the states before becoming law. The framers of the US Constitution wanted it to be difficult to amend. It should be equally difficult to amend the Colorado Constitution. I agree with Penry.
On the topic Steve King said, “Colorado is a sound bite state.”
Homework:
http://www.cobar.org/opinions/opinion.cfm?opinionid=7515&courtid=2
http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20100222/COMMUNITY_NEWS/100229963/1076&ParentProfile=1059
http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/articles/court_lifts_ban_on_some_donati
http://www.junctiondailyblog.com/index.php
https://www.policyarchive.org/bitstream/handle/10207/5582/IRI%20-%20Colorado.pdf?sequence=1
Yesterday the Colorado Supreme Court threw out an initiative, which amended the Colorado State Constitution (Amendment 54.) The court said that the initiative was in violation of the Constitution, despite it being passed with 51% of votes cast in favor.
At the League of Women Voters legislative coffee last Saturday, the same woman who challenged me asked Josh Penry about his bill to reorganize government. Penry indicated that his proposal to revamp government is “probably too grand of a proposal,” but that it should be more difficult to change Colorado’s constitution. His suggestion was that any constitutional amendment be passed twice. The first passage would refer an initiative to the legislature, where it would be debated and corrected for any “unintended consequences,” then referred back to the voters for final approval. Penry felt that bills suffered when there was “no roughing up in the legislature.”
Penry even offered an alternative to the two-times-passage—passage by a super majority. That would be similar to how the US Constitution is amended. Any amendment must be ratified by 2/3 of the states before becoming law. The framers of the US Constitution wanted it to be difficult to amend. It should be equally difficult to amend the Colorado Constitution. I agree with Penry.
On the topic Steve King said, “Colorado is a sound bite state.”
Homework:
http://www.cobar.org/opinions/opinion.cfm?opinionid=7515&courtid=2
http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20100222/COMMUNITY_NEWS/100229963/1076&ParentProfile=1059
http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/articles/court_lifts_ban_on_some_donati
http://www.junctiondailyblog.com/index.php
https://www.policyarchive.org/bitstream/handle/10207/5582/IRI%20-%20Colorado.pdf?sequence=1
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