Amendment 38 - The Ballot Initiative Goes Amok

Again I mention my love-hate relationship with the ballot initiative in Colorado. I love it for its citizen democracy concept - we citizens can actually pass a law. I hate it for the special interests who try to use it to get out their base, to discourage others' bases and to pass crap laws that would never survive the public scrutiny of our elected leaders, idiots that they often are.

Amendment 38 would, on the surface, increase access to the ballot initiative process and make it uniform across the state. Not bad on the surface but its expansion of an already amok process is unpalatable. It also limits the use of exemptions - legislative measures to protect laws from change by ballot initiative - to a hard number, ignoring the fact that there is not a good hard number to assign. It'll stretch ballots, already long with spurious measures, and cost us an election every year. There are positives - it encourages changing statutory law instead of the Constitution but those positives don't offset the negatives of a bill that would allow citizen-democracy to run amok and develop into what Aristotle called the worst form of government, mob rule.

Amendment 38 would best be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. Vote against it.