It takes about 15 minutes to read the U.S. Constitution. Then there’s our state constitution, which runs to more than 68,000 words – longer than the typical paperback novel, and a good deal harder to follow.
At last report, our state Senate was considering a proposal to make it more difficult to amend our state constitution. As it is, an amendment passes with 50 percent plus one vote. This would be changed to 60 percent.
The current requirement for a constitutional amendment is the same as for an initiated law. So if you’re hiring people to circulate petitions for your pet cause, why bother with an initiated law, which the legislature can amend or repeal, when with the same effort you can put your measure beyond the reach of the General Assembly by making it part of the state constitution?
So it’s easy to see why our constitution has become so cluttered, and making it more difficult to amend makes sense. The general charter of our state government ought to concern itself with organization, responsibilities and limitations, not with rules about hog farming and fur trapping.
One sweetener with the current proposal is that initiated laws passed by the voters would be difficult for the legislature to change. For the first five years, a two-thirds majority in each house would be required, rather than a simple majority. So laws initiated and approved by the public at large could be changed, but not casually.
That’s a reasonable compromise. Whatever its other flaws, the legislature does have to hold hearings, consider how measures fit with the rest of state government and look for potential problems. When Amendment 41 passed last year, I suspect that even its most fervent supporters did not want to prohibit the children of state employees from accepting college scholarships.
It would make even more sense, though, to start over with a new state constitution. Colorado’s 1876 charter was based on the constitution of Illinois – and Illinois adopted a new constitution in 1970. Our neighbors in Montana adopted a new state constitution in 1972.
In other words, it’s not impossible to assemble a convention and write a new one. It would even honor the wishes of one of Colorado’s founding fathers. Casimiro Barela of Trinidad was one of the 39 men who wrote our 1876 constitution. He then served for many years in the state Senate.
In 1911, almost a century and dozens of amendments ago, he wrote that “The Constitution of the State of Colorado has become cumbersome and difficult to manage. … [It] has become a codex so large in volume, so imprecise in its scope, that it is as a body of statutory decrees. … A constitutional convention will no doubt be costly, but think of the enormous cost that results from the habit of amending a constitution every two years.”
On the other hand, why bother? Article 15, Section 5 forbids the consolidation of “parallel or competing” railroads, which happened anyway in 1996 – with the support of the governor, no less.
And there’s Article 11, Section 2, which forbids public support of private corporations – a provision that is routinely violated by every economic-development entity in Colorado. Or we could consider water conservancy districts, organized under the judicial branch but exercising the legislative powers like setting property tax levies, and thus violating the separation of powers ordained in Article 3.
In other words, it doesn’t really matter what we do about our state constitution, because nobody pays much attention to it anyway.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
