Peter Schrag’s Feb. 28 column “Justices must do more to rein in initiatives” asks the state Supreme Court to wander further than it has into the political thicket. That’s a bad idea. <\/p>\n
When courts mess with California’s initiative process they get themselves into trouble. Two years ago, a Supreme Court majority decided the people could not statutorily ban gay marriages. The voters turned right around and passed Proposition 8, doing so by constitutional amendment, which the court was forced to uphold. Proposition 8 probably would have lost had the court kept out of the issue in the first place. <\/p>\n
Schrag’s problem is not that the courts are too reticent to overturn initiatives, but that the voters keep doing things he does not like. Liberals howl about the two-thirds rule to raise taxes, which was part of Proposition 13. Well, the voters had a chance by initiative to overturn the two-thirds rule several years back, and chose not to do so. The problem is not that initiatives have made California government dysfunctional; it is that voters refuse to do what the liberal elite want them to on matters of taxes and spending. The people know they have the right to set tax policy in this state, and the courts have been wise to defer to them. <\/p>\n
We are told many initiatives are “poorly drafted and lacking any reliable legislative history.” Are acts of the Legislature any better? Remember energy deregulation, passed with almost no dissent by a Legislature that had no idea how it would work. Few actions of government did more damage to California. Just last month the Assembly busied itself passing budget acts, until someone realized they were voting on the wrong set of bills. For this behavior we should defer to the Legislature. <\/p>\n
Courts can and do overturn initiatives that violate the constitution’s “single subject” rule on the grounds that voters should not be forced to vote on multiple subject measures. Courts have made it quite clear when a constitutional amendment is a revision of the constitution, which cannot be done by the people. <\/p>\n
We have a good balance between the right of the people to make policy through direct democracy and the oversight role of the courts. Popular lawmaking, restrained by court action only when necessary, has worked just fine in California for the past century. We do not need the courts to “rein in” the initiative process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Schrag’s Feb. 28 column “Justices must do more to rein in initiatives” asks the state Supreme Court to wander further than it has into the political thicket. That’s a bad idea. When courts mess with California’s initiative process they get themselves into trouble. Two years ago, a Supreme Court majority decided the people could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}