The Colorado State Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Taxpayer Bill of Rights can be erased with a single vote of state residents — a 5-2 decision that upended conventional wisdom and could put critics of the constitutional amendment in a difficult political position.

For years it was thought that TABOR, which was put into the state Constitution with a single vote, couldn’t be undone that way because it contained so many different pieces. Colorado voters passed something called a single-subject rule two years after TABOR’s passage that narrowed the scope of ballot questions.

Colorado Fiscal Institute and its executive director challenged the idea, and the state Supreme Court agreed with her in a 5-2 decision issued Monday.

Now the big question facing Carol Hedges is whether she’ll go for it.

“We now know that this is a tool that’s available,” she said Monday. “We will negotiate getting a title for this measure … but there’s no guarantee that this is the right option.”

Hedges’ plan, for now, is to get a title for the repeal measure and then take some time to decide whether to take it to voters in 2020.

“We want to gather a broad cross-section of voter opinion on different proposals and determine if that is the direction Colorado wants to go in the future,” she said.

Hedges’ proposed “initiative could not be written more simply or directly,” according to the court decision. “It essentially asks voters a single question: Should TABOR be repealed in full?”

TABOR limits the growth of government by giving voters the authority to approve or reject all proposed tax increases. And it limits how many tax dollars Colorado governments can keep, requiring them to return any money they collect above a spending limit or cap. It also restricts what can be on the ballot in odd-numbered years and dictates the wording of tax increase questions.

Having to take each of these parts out of the Colorado Constitution separately would, the court found, “make it exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to repeal a provision like TABOR,” and “such a process could cause the very problem that the single-subject requirement is designed to avoid, namely, voter surprise.”

Supporters of TABOR say they welcome a debate on whether voters should control the purse strings of Colorado governments large and small.

“I hear progressives on the other side constantly complaining about TABOR,” said Jesse Mallory, Colorado director of the conservative Americans for Prosperity. “Now’s their chance.”

A Republican-funded poll in January found that 47 percent of respondents favored TABOR, 26 percent opposed it, and 26 percent were unsure. After hearing a short explanation of it, 71 percent of respondents favored it, and 28 percent opposed it. The poll was conducted by Austin-based Baselice via landlines, cell phones and online, and it had a margin of error of 4.4 percent.

“I think this will split Democrats,” Colorado Rising Action Director Michael Fields said. “Not because they don’t want to get rid of TABOR, but because of the political realities of supporting a repeal.”

He likened it to Amendment 69, the single-payer ballot question almost 80 percent of Colorado voters rejected back in 2016. Many prominent Democrats, including former Gov. John Hickenlooper, opposed the measure.

Colorado House Speaker KC Becker, a Boulder Democrat, pushed a more modest modification to TABOR through the legislature this session. She helped pass a referral that will ask voters in November to let the state keep all the tax dollars it collects — even the ones that go above the cap.

Becker said that referral, Proposition CC, is what she’s focused on for now, although she thinks the court made the correct decision Monday.

“There’s no doubt that aspects of TABOR created major problems for the state that I don’t think were intended by voters,” Becker said. “But how we fix those problems and who does it, I just don’t know.”