California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom will do anything to keep initiatives that could restore sanity to the state’s government (or protect its citizens or lower the cost of living) off the ballot, and he scored a major victory Thursday morning when the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act cannot appear on the ballot for the November vote.
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Newsom and Democratic leaders in the state legislature filed suit in delayed 2023 to keep the initiative, which would require the state legislature to seek voter approval for any tax boost or novel tax, off the ballot. They argued that the measure would amend the state constitution and therefore could not be passed through the initiative process.
While Oral hearings in May There was extensive discussion about whether the initiative would essentially create a fourth branch of government:
“Since the founding of the state, the legislature has had the ultimate taxing authority,” Margaret Prinzing, an attorney representing the state, said in court. “This measure would remove that power for the first time in California’s history and instead place it in the hands of voters.”
Prinzing argued that this was not simply a change to the tax law in the state constitution, but a fundamental restructuring of the way the government works – a more profound change that could only be proposed by a two-thirds majority in the House or by a constitutional convention.
Judge Goodwin Liu repeatedly pressed counsel for the initiative’s champion, the California Business Roundtable, on the idea during the hour-long hearing, at one point asking whether giving voters power over state taxes would create a fourth branch of government.
“Given the fundamental importance of tax sovereignty, doesn’t this measure essentially lead to a much greater shift from our republican form of government to a direct democracy?” Liu said.
In the OpinionLiu agreed with Prinzing’s conclusion:
Relevant in this context is Article XVIII of the California Constitution, which provides that voters “may amend the Constitution by initiative” (Art. XVIII, § 3), but that an attempt to “revise the Constitution” must be made through a constitutional convention and popular ratification (ibid., § 2) or by submission to the voters by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature (ibid., §§ 1, 3). (See Amador Valley, supra, 22 Cal.3d at p. 221.) After reviewing the petition and the opposition filed by petitioner, we concluded that petitioners had established a prima facie case that the TPA would amount to an invalid constitutional amendment because of its sweeping changes to the existing processes by which tax measures are enacted and maintained at the state and local levels.
Newsom and Democratic Party leaders have so far failed in their efforts to remove from the ballot an initiative to reform the state’s horrific crime-mongering law, Proposition 47, which he and George Gascòn introduced in 2014. But this week they succeeded in forcing business leaders into an “agreement” to remove from the ballot an initiative to reform the Private Attorney Generals Act.
And all this while loudly proclaiming their love for “democracy.”
Democracy: 34 Trump: 0 pic.twitter.com/HBaNIn6kyB
— Speaker Robert Rivas (@CASpeakerRivas) May 30, 2024
(This is a developing story; more details and analysis will be posted as they become available.)
