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Stories Posted on July 30, 2008
State loves to change the law of the land
Category: Initiative and Referendum · State: California · Source: San Francisco Chronicle
The U.S. Constitution has 27 amendments. California's has more than 500. In the past 10 years, Californians have voted on 55 constitutional amendments, and four more are on the November ballot this year. With a state Constitution that can be changed at the ballot box by a simple majority vote, amending the document is often more a political question than a legal one. "We have one of the most unruly constitutions in the world," said Joel Fox, a former aide to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and member of the 1996 California Constitution Revision Commission. "So we make a habit of amending it more often." When backers of Proposition 8, which would bar same-sex marriage, put their measure on the November ballot as a constitutional amendment, opponents complained that such a ban had no place in a document like the state Constitution. Besides Prop. 8, state voters also will decide this fall whether measures on parental notification of abortions (Prop. 4), victims' rights (Prop. 9) and legislative redistricting (Prop. 11) will become part of the voluminous document. But it's hard to say exactly what doesn't belong there, given that the Constitution already contains such minutiae as the unalienable right of Californians to fish on public lands (Article 1, Section 25).