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After spending several hours with the Blue Book,
more formally known as the Analysis of the 2006 Ballot
Proposals prepared by the Legislative Council of the
Colorado General Assembly, I've finally found a theme for
this election. It doesn't cover all the issues, of course,
but it explains quite a few of them.
Call it the Public Indifference Enablement
Factor.
Our theory of republican government is that we
elect people to public positions, we speak up at public
hearings and we inform them of our views, and we monitor
them in office. Then we decide whether to keep them or
replace them, or in extreme cases, to recall them.
But in practice in Colorado, we appear to promote the opposite approach, trying to give us a government we can ignore, and this applies even to the most populist-sounding measures on the ballot.
Take Amendment 38, for instance, which would greatly expand the powers of petition. Under the current system, if I get a notice about a nearby zoning change, I have to study it, then go to a hearing and try to persuade the board to make the right decision.
If 38 passes, I can ignore all that be an active and
informed citizen
stuff, and if six months later, I
discover I didn't like the zoning change that I didn't pay
any attention to at the time, I can hire people to start
circulating sloppy petitions to force an election on the
issue. Thus I can pretty much ignore whatever's going on
now, figuring I can always do something about it later if
necessary.
Consider Amendment 40, which would set term limits for
appellate judges in Colorado. Will I need to read their
opinions and the recommendations from the bar association
to make an intelligent decision on retention? Or can I just
figure Justice A.B. Chaser will be out of office in 10
years or less anyway, so why bother?
Call it the you
don't need to think about this because we're on
auto-pilot
approach to the judiciary branch.
Then there are Amendment 39, which would change the state constitution, and Referendum J, which is merely a statute. Although they differ in some details, both require the same thing: that each school district in Colorado spend at least 65 percent of its budget on classroom instruction.
And there we have another triumph for a lazy citizenry. Why bother to go to school board meetings, or even read about them in the local paper? Why examine the budget yourself to see whether money is being spent appropriately? Why bother voting in school-board elections if the board cannot set spending priorities?
Here in the Lazy State of Colorado, you can just require
the local school district to spend money in certain ways --
never mind if this could cut into security, utilities,
transportation, maintenance, activities or scores of other
things that people expect school districts to handle. This
is sort of a set it and forget
approach to public
education.
These continue a Colorado tradition. With the Bruce Amendment, we can just sit back and quit caring about how much money our government collected, or even how wisely it is spent. We have the TABOR amendment to do our thinking for us.
With term limits, we don't have to ponder whether somebody deserves to stay in office more than eight years. During that last term, we don't have to pay attention, since the office will turn over anyway.
In other words, we don't want to have to think about it. We put government on auto-pilot.
The danger to this trust in constitutional limitations
is that we can be lulled because we're not paying
attention. We think Congress can't pass laws that limit
our freedom of speech which is guaranteed by the
Constitution,
and so we don't notice when it does -- as
with the Patriot Act, which says you can't tell anybody if
you're served with a search warrant under Section 215.
Think of it -- it is currently illegal to make a truthful
statement about a governmental action.
In Colorado, Article XI, Section 2, of our state
constitution forbids government subsidy of private
corporations -- yet often we hear candidates talking about
how to use tax money to provide business
incentives.
In other words, we can't just put stuff in any
constitution and assume that it will be followed. As the
saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty.
But in Colorado, we seem to think we've
discovered this easy, new, no-supervision-necessary method
of government. And as long as we lull ourselves along, it
might make more sense to replace the bighorn sheep with the
tree sloth as our Official State Mammal.
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