“It shall be unlawful for any person to confine a pig during pregnancy in an enclosure.”
That quotation does not come from a law, but from Florida’s state constitution. And it doesn’t belong there.
As the Tallahassee Democrat’s editors put it recently, “Would you vote ‘yes’ for a pregnant pig amendment in the same document that gives you the right to freedom of speech?”
We bring this up not because we disagree with the content of the provision, but because constitutions are supposed to be foundational documents that provide for the creation of law. They are not supposed to spell out specific policies toward pig farming, or even bigger-picture items like tax rates, expenditures, or specific sentences for crimes.
Rather, constitutions are supposed to provide a blueprint for how such things are created fairly by legislators and what limits are set upon their power. Unfortunately, Florida’s referendum system has historically encouraged voters to add weeds to their constitutional garden.
In addition to its detailed instructions on pig farming, the Florida Constitution also contains 713 words regulating net fishing, including definitions of “gill net” and “mesh.” It contains another provision, effectively repealed, that might have been inspired by a 1993 “Simpsons” episode, requiring a monorail or other form of high-speed rail to be established and operated within the state. And where most states banned indoor smoking by statute, Florida did it with a constitutional amendment.
It gets worse, though. This year, Floridian voters will have to decide on a constitutional amendment (Amendment Nine) that would ban both indoor vaping and offshore drilling in Florida.
Yes, that’s right, those two completely unrelated bans are contained within the same referendum. And no, Florida does not allow recreational marijuana use.
Exactly how these two subjects ended up combined in the same referendum is the subject of some controversy. The stated connection is laughable — that they belong together because they treat both “clean air” and “clean water.”
And this particular referendum is actually the creation of the state’s Constitutional Revision Commission, charged with periodically putting amendments before voters to keep the document up with the times. But we very much doubt the propriety of combining measures like these in the fashion of legislative logrolling. The state constitution is not an omnibus bill in Congress, and it is unseemly to pressure voters to add less popular provisions to it by attaching them to more popular provisions.
The ballot initiative and referendum process does not have to be this way. In most states, initiatives are limited to single issues, specific expenditures, or bond issues. Some states merely provide for a people’s veto of bills passed by the legislature. This is all sensible.
The initiative and referendum process works best when it is used to limit the power of government. It works less well where it is used to exploit populist tendencies and bury the foundational principles of state government in a mess of pig slop.
