House Bill 1327: Colorado’s latest homegrown threat to democracy
By Jon Caldara
Yes, yes — the threat to democracy is President Donald Trump. I’ve read the bumper stickers.
But while we’re all hyperventilating about fascism from the White House, we might want to save some furor for the frontal assault on democracy from the Colorado state legislature. I’m talking attacking actual direct democracy.
To my knowledge, no legislature in the country has passed term limits on themselves. Would you vote yourself out of a job?
But Coloradans overwhelmingly voted for term limits several times at the ballot box. How did the question make it to the ballot? Lawmakers certainly wouldn’t refer it there. We citizens used our constitutional right of direct democracy to petition it there.
Colorado has the nation’s strictest ethics law limiting what elected officials can accept in gifts and travel junkets. Legislators didn’t restrict gifts to themselves. The citizen initiative did.
No lawmaker of either party truly loves the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), forcing them to make difficult spending priority decisions. They certainly abhor our campaign finance limits, unless they’re personally fabulously wealthy (I’m not looking at any sitting governor in particular). We have open meeting laws, allowing us to watch what they are doing.
Lawmakers would never restrict their own power by passing these reforms. These checks on power are made possible only by the initiative, by direct democracy.
It’s little wonder legislators hate, loathe and despise the citizen initiative. So, they continually make the initiative process more cumbersome and expense. Their nonstop war on the process demonstrates not only their elitism but their hatred of democracy. They disenfranchise voters.
Direct democracy is the people changing laws despite those in power. The Colorado Constitution clearly guarantees We the People are every bit part of the legislature, on par with any legislator, via the initiative and referendum.
Attacking citizen initiative
I have been intimately involved with the initiative process for three decades, placing several successful and a few unsuccessful proposals on the ballot. The cost, hassle and brain damage have never been worse.
Normal, working Coloradans now can’t afford to petition their government anymore. Only moneyed special interests and the wealthy can.
Years ago, the legislature outlawed paying petition gatherers per signature, making the cost to get signatures prohibitive. The federal courts had to strike down the law as a violation of the First Amendment.
The legislature then mandated both proponents of an initiative attend more required meetings in person. Legislators can attend meeting and vote by Zoom, but we citizens can’t. If just one citizen proponent gets stuck in a traffic jam or gets sick, the entire group’s proposal is tossed.
Basically, it means if you live outside of the Denver metro area, your right to petition your government doesn’t really exist. Thomas Jefferson enumerated it as a reason to break from King George in our Declaration of Independence, “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable and distant … for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”
The requirements on signature gatherers and tedious reporting hurdles continue to spiral out of control.
Recently, the legislature voted to make cutting taxes via the initiative basically impossible. The ballot language is mandated to now contain inaccurate, scare language to frighten voters into voting “no.”
And now this year’s affront to democracy, House Bill 1327, is a smorgasbord of needless ankle-biting mandates made solely to smother our access to democracy.
Among its insults:
It requires those who submit several proposals go through extra paperwork.
It requires legislative staff, when they estimate how much money a new tax might bring in, to use their highest possible estimate and that number must be used on the ballot and the blue book. This makes voters think a tax hike will buy more goodies than it likely will (so, they’ve forced scary language on tax cut proposals and happy language on tax increases — convenient).
It changes the calendar of the initiative process to give proponents less time.
It requires petition gatherers to do more gratuitous paperwork, which if done improperly costs up to $1,500 to the person who didn’t comply properly. Think of that. Personal $1,500 fines for doing some vague paperwork in a way a bureaucrat didn’t like. That is the definition of disenfranchisement.
It’s fine to fret about President Trump’s threat to democracy. But what does it say when we are complicit in the elitist menace to democracy in our own backyard?
