Opinion: We need more democracy, not less
From my perspective, many of the current hot political issues have angles that haven’t been adequately discussed. Here are a few: Amendment 71 is an attempt to make it extremely difficult for any but the most well-funded interest groups to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, much less get it passed. The argument by Colorado’s “We know best” power-brokers is that we need more stability. But in Switzerland, one of the most stable countries in the world, it’s easier to petition to amend their constitution than to amend Colorado’s. A far better fix for Colorado would be to better protect statutory initiatives by only allowing them to be changed with concurrence of two-thirds of both the Senate and the House and consistent with their stated purpose. This would make this type of initiative more attractive and thus limit the use of constitutional amendments, and the Legislature could fix any technical problems discovered after passage. Propositions 107 and 108 support open pri...