Citizens in Charge

Shortly after the lunch break and without a TV crew in sight, the [Colorado] Senate State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee first passed a proposal that would largely gut the ability of ordinary citizens to propose amendments to the state constitution.

Those were the words of husband-and-wife petition rights activists Jessica and Robert Corry at the Huffington Post in response to Sens. Tapia and White’s attempt to cutoff Coloradans access to their own constitution. The bill would require citizen initiatives to achieve a 60% supermajority at the ballot box in order to become law, as well as impose a requirement that signatures be gathered according to a certain geographic distribution.

Some of you may recall that the Foundation awarded Robert Corry our John Lilburne Award for December 2008 for his successful efforts to fight Referendum O, the Colorado general assembly’s last attempt to take away voter’s rights by changing the state’s constitution.

The Huffington Post piece gives a great breakdown of the last few rounds of Colorado politicians seemingly relentless attempts to weaken voters petitioning rights, and it is worth going farther and pointing out that both of the two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases dealing with restrictions on petitioning rights came from Colorado. In both cases - Meyer v. Grant and Buckley v. ACLF - the court struck down draconian restrictions on the petition process imposed by Colorado lawmakers.

They say the definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Having been rebuked in their attempts to slight voters both at the polls and in the courts, one has to wonder if that definition doesn’t apply to some Centennial State lawmakers…