A Favor to the Voters

The California Supreme Court has brought some welcome reason and clarity to the state’s often confusing initiative process. Its 5-2 vote Monday to remove from the March 7 ballot Proposition 24, which had two distinct subjects, is a favor to voters. The court properly held that the proposition violates a provision of the state Constitution limiting an initiative to a single subject.

Proponents cried foul and “politics,” but the court did exactly what it should have done after years of erring on the side of caution and allowing flawed initiatives to go before voters. For example, the failed Big Green initiative of 1990 would have tightened standards on food, chemicals, water, air quality, timber cutting, offshore oil and gas and issued bonds to buy old-growth redwoods. That’s far from a single issue.

The major purpose of Proposition 24, sponsored by antitax activist Ted Costa and Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation, was to take the post-census process of redrawing legislative district lines away from the Legislature and give it to a commission appointed by the Supreme Court. To lure voters, they added an unrelated sweetener, a provision to slash state legislators’ pay and living expenses. Sponsors must have swallowed hard in claiming that only one subject was represented--legislative conflict of interest. Democrats sued to block the measure.

In the past, the court left measures on the ballot knowing they would be challenged after the election. This time the court took the Constitution at its word: that an initiative “embracing more than one subject may not be submitted to the electors.”

Not only did Proposition 24 contain two distinct subjects, but one of them--the cut in lawmakers’ salaries from $99,000 to $75,000 a year--was merely bait. California voters have rejected three reapportionment proposals, but cutting legislators’ benefits has been quite a popular issue. This devious provision in Proposition 24 declared that “legislators should not be entitled to raise their own pay”; in reality, that authority already had been given to an independent commission.

Critics of the court ruling claim it usurps the rights of the 1 million voters who signed Proposition 24 petitions. But how many of them, snared briefly in front of a supermarket, signed merely because they were told it would “cut the Legislature’s pay”? The single-subject rule was adopted by voters in 1948 for a good reason, to halt a trend toward confusing multi-subject ballot proposals. As the court said Monday, it is an integral safeguard against improper manipulation or abuse of the initiative process.

Activists have fruitlessly searched for a means of reforming the initiative process without weakening it. The Supreme Court on Monday may have found one way.