Florida unfortunately does not have an actual ballot initiative process. People have been misusing the constitutional amendment process as a makeshift ballot initiative process for the past couple of decades.

Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?

On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.

Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.

fun fact: the FL amendment requiring 60% supermajority only passed by 57%

A similar move was attempted on the eve of the OH amendment to guarantee the right to reproductive care. Thankfully it was defeated.

100% agree. No implementation details, just a setup for additional court cases... when we've seen that courts making decisions on reproductive rights doesn't count for too much.

On the spectrum from bare majority to unanimity, being in the bottom 20% of the range is not "a wide margin."

If a race between two candidates ended up at 57% vs. 43%, everyone would call it a landslide.

Hot take of the day: no judge should dare review the will of the people, be it expressed in a constitutional or merely legislative vote.

The plebiscite/referendum is the ultimate authority.

There's no such thing as "the will of the people", though -- "the people" is a loose aggregation of lots of different individuals, communities and factions that are not uniformly aligned in their interests and values.

The point of having a political process is to define a structured way of resolving the conflicts that arise from those divergences of interests and values, not to pretend that the output of specific elections somehow represents the singular will of the entirety of society. Presuming that is a grave error that inevitably results in the strongest faction imposing its will unilaterally onto all others.

Democracy is a great way of deciding political questions, but without safeguards in place to ensure that that it's kept within defined bounds of what qualifies as a political question in the first place, it will degrade into authoritarianism pretty rapidly.

We absolutely need judicial review, and plebiscites in which narrow majorities approve of policies that are unconstitutional, or otherwise violate people's fundamental rights, should unquestionably be struck down, just as equivalent policies enacted by a legislative body would.

my hope is that somehow, someway, somewhere.... there is a politician who will think twice about further stripping reproductive rights because of this. Or maybe even someone who will help expand. It is a popular position with wide support.... and hopefully that does mean something.

you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.

That's a great counterpoint. Thanks!