A flier in my mailbox touts Amendment 71 as “the most important initiative on the ballot this November,” which no doubt is true. It’s not often, after all, that the political and business elites team up in an effort to cripple a fundamental right that Coloradans have exercised for more than 100 years: the right to amend the Constitution in defiance of the political power structure.

And make no mistake: That is the amendment’s unstated purpose, despite a barrage of assurances to the contrary.

Proponents claim they merely seek to stiffen requirements for constitutional amendments to qualify for the ballot so citizens will instead opt to change state law when that tactic would suffice. They say some amendments that could be statutes end up in the state constitution, and on this narrow question they have a point. For example, shouldn’t the minimum wage and tobacco taxes, both of which we’ll be voting on again this year, be matters of law rather than constitutional directives?

But if the goal was to prod citizens to choose statutes over constitutional amendments when they have that option (they don’t in every case, as we’ll see), proponents of reform could simply have raised the signature threshold for amendments. Or they could have imposed a requirement for a supermajority vote and stopped there.

Amendment 71 does in fact boost the percentage of votes required to pass a constitutional amendment from a majority to 55 percent, which by itself would have doomed a number of the best-known initiatives of the past half-century and deterred who knows how many other campaigns from even gearing up. But the amendment doesn’t stop there. It also requires a percentage of signatures be gathered in each of 35 state Senate districts, thus inflating the already high cost of running an initiative and guaranteeing that an even thicker cloud of legal challenges descend on every batch of petitions.

The combination of those two provisions — a supermajority and a signature floor in Senate districts — will throttle one of the seminal reforms of the Progressive Era that empowered individual citizens. And that presumably is the idea, since leading proponents are a sophisticated bunch that includes, as they never stop telling us, every “living governor” and a host of other politicians as well as powerful business groups such as Colorado Concern and oil and gas groups.

These people surely know that a supermajority requirement alone would be enough to ensure that activists choose statutes over amendments whenever possible. Indeed, the 55 percent threshold would have spelled defeat for three of the four amendments that have given politicians the most heartburn in the past quarter-century, namely the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (53.7 percent), Amendment 23’s funding mandate for schools (52.7 percent), and medical marijuana (53.5 percent). The fourth, legalization of marijuana in 2012, barely garnered 55 percent. Whether activists would have sought to place it on the ballot under Amendment 71’s restrictions is open to question.

Nor do those amendments exhaust the list of those that would have failed or been jeopardized.

To be sure, a few measures would have passed with a comfortable supermajority, such as term limits in 1990 (70 percent) and campaign finance reform in 2002 (67 percent), but those are unusual margins. Most measures already fail to get a simple majority of votes, let alone a supermajority.

Amendment 71’s supporters say it’s unfair that petition signatures could come primarily from “the patch of ground between Denver and Boulder,” as Colorado Concern president Mike Kopp put it in an op-ed. An overwrought editorial in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel also included the obligatory dig at the supposed Denver-Boulder axis, while calling arguments against 71’s geographical mandates “offensive” and “cynical.”

No, here’s something offensive and cynical: the fact that Amendment 71’s sponsors were unable to demonstrate that they complied with the rules they’d impose on everyone else and secured the signatures from at least 2 percent of registered voters in each Senate district.

Mark Grueskin, a prominent elections attorney, pointed out in a memo last month that “most other states that require geographic dispersion of petition signatures apply that requirement to a majority of legislative districts, not 100 percent of them.” With 71’s mandate, he adds, “a single Senate district representing less than 3 percent of the state population … will have veto power over presenting a ballot measure to voters statewide.”

Nor do all ballot measures originate in the dread Denver-Boulder corridor anyway. The most controversial amendment of the past generation, TABOR, was authored by a Colorado Springs resident and garnered greater support in rural than urban areas.

Proponents of 71 worry that “special interests” lurk behind many initiatives, but their amendment would ensure that only special interests have the wherewithal to go to the ballot. Contrary to the Daily Sentinel’s naive claim that it will “cost you $200,000” to gather sufficient signatures for the ballot, or maybe $500,000 in “hot election years,” two of this year’s initiative campaigns each spent more than $900,000 to get on the ballot. Even one that fell short invested more than half a million dollars. Amendment 71 would spike those figures toward the stratosphere.

Those “living governors” who back Amendment 71 are right that the bar should be somewhat higher for constitutional amendments — but not radically so. When citizens seek to rein in the power or privileges of elected officials, or change the structure of government, or enact policy that officials have explicitly resisted and would be sure to roll back, they often have no choice but to choose an amendment.

Citizen amendments over the years include important reforms such as home rule (1912), providing recall from office (1912), creating juvenile courts (1912), statewide prohibition (1914) and its repeal (1932), old-age pensions (1936), merit selection of judges (1966), barring the 1976 Olympics (1972), limiting annexations (1974), barring the detonation of nuclear devices without voter approval (1974), banning public funds for abortion (1984), allowing mountain casinos (1990), term limits (1990), Great Outdoors Colorado (1992), TABOR (1992), funding boosts for public schools (2000), and the legal uses of marijuana (2000 and 2012), among other measures.

You may not like every one of them — who would? — but the point is that they often involved issues neglected or spurned by elected leaders. Amendment 71 would go too far in limiting the right by which frustrated Coloradans seek to govern themselves.

Vincent Carroll is a former Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor.

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