Initiatives can’t be just anything

Editorial By IR Staff - 9/21/06

It isn’t hard to agree with Helena District Judge Tom Honzel’s ruling that CI-97, a ballot measure to cap state spending in Montana, is unconstitutional and therefore invalid.

Honzel found that the initiative ran afoul of the constitutional rule that proposed amendments may change only one section of the constitution and have a single purpose. Initiatives that fail to meet those criteria must be divided into separate initiatives to be voted on separately.

CI-97, of course, would necessarily make all kinds of changes in order to ensure that just about every sort of government service would eventually be starved for funds.

But it was interesting that Attorney General Mike McGrath, although presumably not in favor of the amendment himself, had agreed with its supporters that CI-97 did indeed have a single purpose — to limit future state spending. He said, no doubt correctly, that it would not be feasible to break CI-97 into separate provisions because each of the provisions depends on the others and would be useless by themselves.

So what does this mean? Are some proposals, whether reasonable or not, unfit to be valid initiatives simply because they are too complicated?

You bet they are.

The Montana constitution’s refusal to allow initiatives that contain multiple amendments is not only sound, it is vital to the integrity of the process. The ease with which people can get “stealth” initiatives on the ballot that proclaim to be about one thing — say, abuse of eminent domain — but actually are about another — say, gutting all meaningful land-use planning — is ample proof of that.

The legislative process is often compared to making sausage. And it is true that lawmaking isn’t always the prettiest thing to watch. (The resulting sausage isn’t always very edible, either.) But, in cases of truly convoluted public issues, imagine how ugly the results could be if the voters were asked to do the butchering.