(03-30-2023, 08:53 PM)copycat Wrote:

(03-29-2023, 03:46 PM)mikesez Wrote: Here's a practical example.
About 25 years ago, environmentalists came up with a plan to restore the everglades while bypassing the state legislature.  It was a constitutional amendment.  The FL Supreme Court was hostile.  The plan was to constitutionally mandate a minimum penny per pound tax on sugar produced in FL.  The legislature would be allowed to raise the tax, but not lower it.  The money would be required to be spent on buying up sugar farms and restoring them, the legislature would be unable to divert it or store it up.  As you see, that's all a system of ideas that all have to go together.  On their own, they are pointless.  The FL Supreme Court decided that this system violated the one topic rule for constitutional amendments, however.  They let the amendment proposal stay, after they split it into two ballot items.  Predictably, people thought the fund for glades restoration sounded pretty good, and that became law.  But the people decided that minimum tax rates sounded bad, and nixed that.  So we had this nice fund with no money in it.  A dog with no legs.  

All of this mucking around happened because it was obvious to the activists that Florida legislators, even though they have term limits, even though more of them come from tourist areas than farming areas, even though they come from both parties, effectively all of them are bought and paid for by Big Sugar.  

So we did term limits, and competitive elections, and reduced gerrymandering, and none of it worked.  Then this "common sense" constraint to limit referenda to one topic frustrated our attempt to work around it.

Yet you better believe that if the Legislature or the CRC wants to amend something, there is no single subject rule.  That's for us, not them.

As I mentioned funding of a bill is separated from the bill itself and could pose a problem.  This is a different scenario though.  First of all this was a state constitutional amendment not a federal bill.  Secondly if we are going to adopt this concept we should hammer out how funding would be treated.  Definitely a fine line between the two however this is way out of the boundaries of what my suggestion is attempting to eliminate.

At the state level we have so many dedicated accounts with so many revenue streams feeding them, that it might be practical to try to make a one topic rule for out legislature, with the one exception being a bill that raises dedicated funds and also designates how to spend them.  But at the federal level there are fewer dedicated funds.  And at both levels most of the spending is out of the general fund, and that's where most of the potentially corrupt deals are made.

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