Hoisted By Their Own Petard

In today's St. Petersburg Times, Steve Bousquet notes that Florida lawmakers seeking to push through big property tax cuts have made things harder for themselves with their recent (successful) effort to raise the hurdles for constitutional amendments.

Until the passage of a 2006 constitutional amendment by voters, it only took a simple majority of voters to change the constitution. A lot of people thought this was too easy, so the amendment vote was set up. And 57 percent of Florida voters thought it was a good idea.

Of course, the result of that vote is that if Florida lawmakers pass a bill expanding the $25,000 homestead exemption (which would have to be ratified by Florida voters), 57 percent of Florida voters would no longer be enough to ratify it.

Is this a good thing? Maybe. If you think of a constitution as being a form of "higher law," different from the everyday statutes lawmakers pass every day, then it makes some sense to have a higher standard for changing these higher laws. For anything important enough to be written into the state's constitution, this way of thinking goes, you better be able to get more than a bare majority of people to support it.

Of course, the flaw in this argument is that when the constitution gets used for things that are fairly mundane, like the level of the state's homestead exemption or (as Louisiana does) the income tax brackets, then your constitution is no longer composed entirely of things that can be described as "higher law." It's more like a shopping list than a bible.

But if a state constitution is a mix of fundamental rights and bookkeeping measures, you've either got to be too free and easy with the fundamental rights (as Florida legally was before 2006) or a bit harsh on the bookkeeping stuff (as Florida arguably is now). So, what Florida does now is not more obviously wrong than what they did two years ago.

The real answer, for what it's worth: get the basic stuff out of the constitution. Make your state's constitution truly "higher law" in the sense that it contains the really fundamentally important things and excludes the knick-knacks.