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Posts Tagged ‘California Supreme Court’
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
California’s Cautionary Constitutional History

For those perturbed by the federal government’s lack of responsiveness to the will of the people, California’s voter initiative process shows the danger of the opposite extreme. Recently, Ronald George, Chief Justice of California’s Supreme Court, questioned the wisdom of the state’s constitutional-amendment-by-initiative process. In a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, George criticized the ease with which voters can change the fundamental law of California, a practice that has yielded 500 amendments since 1879. To compare, the United States Constitution contains 17 amendments, plus the 10 known as the Bill of Rights, over a time period spanning twice as long.

George’s lament is that frequent and easy changes to the primary source of law are not the criteria for sustained, peaceful government. Instead, the continuous use of such measures (and the threat of more in the future) renders government dysfunctional by making the legislative process merely the starting point of a policy debate, not its conclusion. Moreover, legal challenges to popularly passed initiatives put judges in the unenviable position of trying to discern the voters’ intent without the benefit of the usual contextual sources (e.g. legislative history, factual findings, committee reports, etc.). If California goes forward with calls for a constitutional convention, one hopes that the delegates remember the virtue of constraining lawmaking to a system governed by checks and balances, the separation of powers, and representative democracy. As we see with the current White House, though, hope alone won’t ensure a better government.