Constitutional Amendments

The San Francisco Chronicle thinks the California state constitution is too easy to amend. It's been amended more than 500 times. The paper doesn't say it outright, but it might make sense to make it more difficult to qualify a constitutional amendment for the ballot, while making it easier to qualify an initiative statute. The constitutional change requires more signatures -- a number equal to 8 percent of the number of votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election -- than the initiative -- 5 percent.

I've been wrestling with what the best formula would be. I think that if certain kinds of initiatives are to be more difficult, thus limiting the people's ability to legislate or amend the constitution directly, then it ought to be much easier for the people to overrule the legislature via referendum. How about rolling back that current requirement for signatures -- now 5 percent of the gubernatorial votes -- to something like 1 percent?

As their session came to a close Tuesday, Colorado state lawmakers passed a sensible reform to the initiative process. They raised the standards to qualify an initiative that would change the state constitution, but lowered the standard to qualify an initiative that changes a mere statute. There had been no separate standard before, and that meant that the Colorado constitution had a lot of new amendments. Why bother with changing the law when, for the same money and effort, you can change the state constitution?

This legislation is important because it recognizes the value of lowering signature standards. In most cases, reform consists of raising signature standards -- which merely adds cost and limits the process to rich individuals and interest groups.