Colorado may be the leanest state by average body weight, but that’s not true of its constitution. It grows fatter every couple of years, through citizen initiatives and legislative referendums.
The Colorado Constitution is eight or nine times as long as the U.S. Constitution. Too long. A constitution should be a set of basic principles, not a collection of bureaucratic particulars.
Very little big-picture thinking has gone into the document’s revisions, and they aren’t working well together. Particularly troublesome are conflicting directives limiting overall revenue, holding down property taxes and requiring annual increases in school spending.
Legislators increasingly talk about making it harder to amend the constitution in the future. But that doesn’t clean up the existing confusion.
Winter Park Republican Al White is a leading advocate of a constitutional convention, to “comb the cockleburs out of the hair of this beast,” as he puts it.
It’s risky. Opponents of a convention worry about power-mad delegates taking away rights. But it might be the only way to trim the thing down to size.
Just how out-of-control is the state constitution?
The U.S. Constitution fills 15 pages of Volume 1 of the Colorado Revised Statutes. The Colorado Constitution fills some 700 pages.
But nearly 80 percent of that consists of “Annotations” that explain court interpretations, some of them many times longer than the sections they explain. There are no annotations in the U.S. Constitution pages, so the page-number comparison is flawed.
Another way to measure the difference is that there are 69 sections in the U.S. Constitution, 343 in Colorado’s – roughly five times as many for the state. But many of the state sections are much longer.
For example, the 2002 campaign finance ballot issue fills 10 pages – two-thirds the length of the entire U.S. Constitution. The medical marijuana law is almost five pages, and revenue-limiting TABOR is three full pages.
The state constitution prohibits ballot issues from addressing more than one subject, so a coordinated cleanup of all the conflicting provisions would be impossible.
This is why some think it might be best to start from scratch with a constitutional convention. The original 1876 constitution tells how to go about it. But the directions are “pretty vague,” as White points out.
They do make it clear that only the legislature can call a convention. The governor can’t, nor can the courts. It can’t be done by citizen initiative, either. To start the ball rolling, the legislature has to pass a referendum by a minimum two-thirds majority.
The constitutional convention question is put to voters at the next even-year general election. If voters approve, the legislature at its next regular session sets a time, place and budget for the convention.
But before that happens, the delegates have to be elected. There will be 70 of them, two elected from each of the 35 state Senate districts.
The convention meets within three months after the delegates are elected, and the delegates have six months to put recommended revisions on the ballot, apparently at a special election.
It could take up to four elections over eight years, but White thinks the process can be speeded up by putting delegate candidates and the convention question on the same ballot. He also believes the convention’s assignment can be limited to specific sections of the constitution.
White is term-limited in the House, but he’s likely to run for the Senate and try to continue the battle for constitutional clarity there. “We’ve got to stop the train before it hits the brick wall,” he says.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
