After spending several hours with the “Blue Book” (more formally known as the Analysis of the 2006 Ballot Proposals prepared by the Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly), I’ve finally found a theme for this election. It doesn’t cover all the issues, of course, but it explains quite a few.
Call it “the Public Indifference Enablement Factor.” Our theory of republican government is that we elect people to public positions, we speak up at public hearings and we inform them of our views, and we monitor them in office. Then we decide whether to keep them or replace them or, in extreme cases, to recall them.
But in practice in Colorado, we appear to promote the opposite approach, trying to give us a government we can ignore, and this applies even to the most populist-sounding measures on the ballot.
Take Amendment 38, for instance, which would greatly expand the powers of petition. Under the current system, if I get a notice about a nearby zoning change, I have to study it, then go to a hearing and try to persuade the board to make the right decision.
If 38 passes, I can ignore all that “be an active and informed citizen” stuff and, if six months later I discover I didn’t like the zoning change that I didn’t pay any attention to at the time, I can hire people to start circulating sloppy petitions to force an election on the issue. Thus I can pretty much ignore whatever’s going on now, figuring I can always do something about it later.
Consider Amendment 40, which would set term limits for appellate judges in Colorado. Will I need to read their opinions and the recommendations from the bar association to make an intelligent decision on retention? Or can I just figure “Justice A.B. Chaser will be out of office in 10 years or less anyway, so why bother?” Call it the “you don’t need to think about this because we’re on auto-pilot” approach to the judiciary branch.
Then there are Amendment 39, which would change the state constitution, and Referendum J, which is merely a statute. Although they differ in some details, both require the same thing: that each school district in Colorado spend at least 65 percent of its budget on classroom instruction.
And there we have another triumph for a lazy citizenry. Why bother to go to school board meetings, or even read about them in the local paper? Why examine the budget yourself to see whether money is being spent appropriately? Why bother voting in school-board elections if the board cannot set spending priorities?
Here in the Lazy State of Colorado, you can just require the local school district to spend money in certain ways – never mind if this could cut into security, utilities, transportation, maintenance, activities or scores of other things that people expect school districts to handle. This is sort of a “set it and forget it” approach to public education.
These continue a Colorado tradition. With the Bruce Amendment, we can just sit back and quit caring about how much money our government collected, or even how wisely it is spent. We have the TABOR amendment to do our thinking for us.
With term limits, we don’t have to ponder whether somebody deserves to stay in office more than eight years. During that last term, we don’t have to pay attention, since the office will turn over anyway.
In other words, we don’t want to have to think about it. We put government on auto-pilot.
The danger to this trust in constitutional limitations is that we can be lulled because we’re not paying attention. We think, “Congress can’t pass laws that limit our freedom of speech which is guaranteed by the Constitution,” and so we don’t notice when it does – as with the Patriot Act, which says you can’t tell anybody if you’re served with a search warrant under Section 215. Think of it: It is currently illegal to make a truthful statement about a governmental action.
In Colorado, Article XI, Section 2 of our state constitution forbids government subsidy of private corporations – yet often we hear candidates talking about how to use tax money to provide “business incentives.”
In other words, we can’t just put stuff in any constitution and assume that it will be followed. As the saying goes, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” But in Colorado, we seem to think we’ve discovered this easy, new, no-supervision-necessary method of government. And as long as we lull ourselves along, it might make more sense to replace the bighorn sheep with the tree sloth as our Official State Mammal.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
