Cambridge Citi 1: California Proposition 8 : comments.
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(no subject)
As someone said, wtf is with a constitution that can be amended by a majority vote? It sort of makes sense, if, eg. you want the electorate to propose a constitution the legislature can't arbitrarily break, but surely the purpose is to provide some sort of inertia to prevent knee-jerk actions.
(no subject)
Concrete overshoes :-)
(no subject)
In this case, the legislation-by-referendum approach was a way to break a railroad company's control over the state government, back in the 1930s.
Just to complicate things, there are two kinds of change to the California constitution, "amendments" (which can be passed by the process we've just seen) and more substantive "revisions" which have to go through a more complicated process, starting with passage by the state legislature. So it is entirely possible—our side is working on the lawsuits now—that the state constitution cannot be amended to this extent by majority vote.
(That said, all numerical requirements are arbitrary: I can imagine someone wondering what kind of constitution can be amended by a mere 3/4 vote, and someone else asking how you can have a constitution that nobody voted on.)
(no subject)
The idea of commonly holding referenda at all is fascinating; it's something people often talk about in principle, yet until recently I wasn't aware was common anywhere. There are obvious drawbacks for votes with tradeoffs (referendums on lower/higher taxes, without specifying what the spending would be on, for instance), and of knee-jerk responses, but you do get some control from citizens more specifically than "party A" or "party B".