Ballot Initiatives, Love 'Em or Hate 'Em

I got my blue book today although it's printed on unbleached brown paper. That thing is HUGE! It's a good half-inch thick, compressed. It's my intention to go through the initiatives over the next few days from a progressive point of view but first I'd like to talk about the ballot initiative process itself.

I both love and hate the process. It embodies all that is both good and bad about our democracy - citizens can effectively say to their lawmakers "this is what we want" on an issue. On the other hand, special interests can also use the initiative for their own purposes, not always aboveboard as we'll see when we get into the actual initiatives. The grossest abuse of the initiative process is to amend the Constitution, already a monster of a document, to enshrine measures that should have been law in an almost repeal-proof form. Bad law can also be passed through populist sentiment, TABOR is an example of a law that appeared good on the surface but had unintended consequences during the recent economic downturn and required a ballot initiative to fix.

At its best, the ballot initiative is a way to get reluctant lawmakers off the pot. At its worst, it's a populist nightmare. Am I glad we have the ballot initiative? You bet. I'm just glad that few of them tend to pass. And that Coloradans, by and large, are a whole lot brighter than our lawmakers believe we are.

God bless Amerika!