Colorado’s Tabor seems headed for the U.S. Supreme Court. Tabor came about 20 years ago through a popular vote. It regulates how the state raises money and taxes its people. It requires a popular vote to raise taxes. As a consequence, Colorado has been required to use all manner of political shell games and subterfuges to fund education and the rest of state government.
A few years ago the voters lifted Tabor’s stranglehold over Colorado’s treasury temporarily to keep the schools open. Now the whole philosophy of direct government by the people is being challenged.
A group of former legislators and others with extensive experience in government have banded together and filed a lawsuit challenging the law. Its goal is to restore representative democracy in Colorado; to give the power back to elected legislators and an elected governor. In short, Colorado would be governed as Kansas, and most of the other states, are.
In an article written by Kirk Johnson of the New York Times, the nut of the suit was stated:
“ … On the surface, the suit seems technical, arguing that Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, generally considered the tightest cap on spending and taxation in the nation, blocks the ability and jurisdiction of the state Legislature to properly do its job.
“The deeper intellectual wellspring, though, harks back to the definitions of what a representative democracy is supposed to be, as articulated by the nation’s founding framers, especially James Madison, the fourth president. In the Federalist Papers, a series of essays written in part by Madison in support of the Constitution, he pushed strongly for a barrier between the passions of the popular will and sober governance of the nation through a legislative branch. The lawsuit, filed last year, will have its first major hearing in federal District Court in Denver on Feb. 15.”
The lawsuit contends that a “legislature unable to raise and appropriate funds, cannot meet its primary constitutional obligations. Since the passage of Tabor in 1992, the State of Colorado has experienced a slow, inexorable slide into fiscal dysfunction.”
LEGAL EXPERTS doubt the lawsuit will succeed. Coloradoans should pray the experts are wrong.
As experience in both California and Colorado has demonstrated over and over again, government by the people through the initiative and referendum is bad government most of the time.
There are several reasons for this. A law like Tabor, for example, that requires a popular vote to raise taxes assumes the public will take the trouble to study complex budget matters, reach a reasoned decision on them and then vote. That doesn’t happen. What happens is that special interests flood the news media with advertising to persuade the people to vote for or against the initiative. Then, on election day, a minority of the population makes the decision. The general public won’t take the time or devote the resources required to learn enough about running a government to do the job well.
In this day of electronic media, government by initiative and referendum is government by those who can buy the most electronic coverage — and government by segments of the population most affected by the initiative in question. Paradoxically, popular government does a lousy job of serving the populace.
Those most in favor of so-called popular government are those most confident of their ability to persuade and manipulate the public.
Representative government, in contrast, is actually more in touch with the people, more interested in achieving the common good. While a majority of the population rarely votes on an initiative in the states where that system is in use, almost all decisions made in elected legislatures are made by all of their members — and most of those members are sensitive to the popular will.
Are elected legislatures perfect? Far from it. But we should keep them and jealously protect their powers because they are far better at making decisions that further the common good than are the people themselves.
