The will of the voters is heard perhaps too damned often
Today's Denver Post opinion pages begin with two columnists arguing about the value of voter initiatives.

I'll be right up front. I like the idea of TABOR, which would never have happened if it hadn't been an initiative, but I hate hate hate voter initiatives. Voter initiatives constitute my paying twice for something that was supposed to be done right once. We already have a legislature that represents voter interests.

How exactly does a bad law, passed as an initiative instead of through the legislative process, get repealed? How does a bad initiative get improved, modified, adjusted for agreement with Constitutional protections or even with existing Colorado law, before it goes on the ballot? Even attempts to make the initiative process obey simple requirements such as "single subject" are circumvented, often drawing the courts effectively into the business of legislating.

I agree with Mr Briggs, that initiatives to amend the Constitution are worse than legislative initiatives. A Constitution needs an amendment process that places as many hurdles as possible in the path of each amendment, from each branch of government as well as direct voter will, much like the path that ordinary legislation must take, but more stringent.

Conventions are hotbeds of potential for abuse too; witness New York's Constitution, that allows a Convention to be voted up or down only every 20 years. Otherwise, individual amendments must be passed through two consecutive sessions of the legislature, one before and one after a general election, before it can be put to a popular vote. Even with such controls in place to avoid seeming random or bizarre amendments, their Constitution has come to resemble an encyclopedia. What other hurdle could be added to this process to weed out nonsensical amendments? Still they exist.

There is a limit to how much we can rely on processes to make governments behave, however one defines "behave" and however one agrees in the first place with the premise that governments are supposed to behave.

We may have reached that limit in Colorado, and are now dealing with problems that are created by the tinkering with processes itself. The unspoken assumption may be that it shouldn't matter who we elect, or what kind of people we elect, the outcome will be acceptable. Further tinkering with processes will only mask our failure to elect officials who understand and obey their Constitutional constraints, or failure to eject public officials who ignore them.

And our failure to accept some of the downsides, compromises, and consequences that laws always bring with them.