Arizona Senate Republicans are making another bid to dilute the Voter Protection Act that Arizonans adopted to keep legislators from tinkering with what they approve at the ballot.
Currently legislators are restricted from repealing or changing voter-approved initiatives, unless they can muster a three-fourths majority vote of both the House and Senate for amendments that “further the purpose” of the original law. SCR 1034 would give lawmakers permission, by a simple majority, to effectively rewrite or repeal an entire voter-enacted law if any part, no matter how small, were declared illegal or unconstitutional by a court.
If the voter-approved measure raised money, lawmakers would also be free to divert the dollars from the program for which it was originally intended and use them elsewhere.
Sen. Martin Quezada said the resolution’s proponents were being "hypocritical.'' The Glendale Democrat noted that a staff attorney regularly reviews all bills and resolutions before the Senate. Some are flagged as unconstitutional. Yet Republicans have a history of approving those measures anyway against their own attorney’s advice, Quezada said.
"We just move it right along,'' he said.
Quezada compared that with initiatives that often deal with very complex issues because the Republican-controlled legislature will not. As a safety valve of sorts, each contains a "severance clause,'' spelling out that if one part of the measure ultimately is voided by a court, the balance remains in full force and effect.
SCR 1034 would instead allow a single flawed provision to undermine the rest of the measure.
"It would allow us to ignore the will of the voters and change the entire initiative because one small part is found unconstitutional,'' Quezada said. "So we are basically doing the opposite of what the Voter Protection Act wants us to do, which is to respect the will of the voters.''
Sen. Vince Leach, a Tucson Republican pushing the measure, said he does not see his plan as going against the will of the voters.
"Voters are assuming, probably because they have not checked, that what was put before them to sign is, in fact, constitutional,'' he said. And Leach said if people had known that up front "they probably wouldn't have signed it.''
Senators approved the resolution, which still requires a vote in the House. As a constitutional amendment, the last word would be up to voters in 2022.
The Voter Protection Act is a direct outgrowth of a 1996 ballot measure which would have allowed doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients. Rather than go along, however, lawmakers effectively repealed the measure the following year, insisting that voters did not really understand what they were approving. So proponents turned around in 1998 and got voters to approve the constitutional bar against future legislatures second-guessing what voters really wanted.
What Leach is proposing is not unique. GOP legislators have been trying off and on since 1998 to trim its scope or repeal it outright.
None of those efforts have succeeded.