TALLAHASSEE - It's hard to find a more tedious read than the Florida Constitution. At 78 single-spaced pages, it's hard on the eyes and the attention span.
Thanks to the state's 37-year history of citizen initiatives, our Constitution offers occasional moments of relief from the boring technical verbiage on bonding, local government, courts and legislative machinations. For example, there's the ban on caging pregnant pigs and the never-enacted plan to force polluters to pay for the environmental damage they cause.
By comparison, the U.S. Constitution, complete with 27 amendments, is a svelte 18 pages.
Who cares about the state Constitution's shape? A lot of powerful politicians, as well as their friends in the business world.
Less than a year after a failed attempt by the Legislature to make it harder to amend the state Constitution, Florida's Republican leaders, backed by the state's influential business lobby, are back at it.
They say they're leery of the proliferation of citizen initiatives that make big fiscal demands on the state budget, particularly the 2002 amendment requiring the state to shrink class sizes. They also argue the process has been hijacked in recent years by special interests, such as the $36.7-million fight between doctors and trial lawyers that put three measures on the November ballot.
Lawmakers are expected to vote this session to put a pair of recycled ideas from last year on the 2006 general election ballot. One would ask voters to require 60 percent approval for constitutional amendments. The other would ask voters to limit citizen petitions to issues affecting basic rights, government structure or items already in the state Constitution.
House Speaker Allan Bense, R-Panama City, and Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, back the plans, having cast votes in their favor last year.
A third measure backed by Gov. Jeb Bush, but still in development, would require that any citizen initiative with a fiscal impact include a proposed funding source. But its passage is less certain.
Some Republican lawmakers are aiming higher.
One of the Legislature's most respected members, Sen. Daniel Webster, R-Winter Garden, and a key ally in the House have launched a two-year plan to write a stripped-down version of the state Constitution by moving all nonessential clauses to the state law books. Voters would also have to approve that plan.
Some opponents question whether Webster is seeking to remove the state Constitution's privacy and church-state clauses, which have posed impediments to school prayer and other issues. But Webster has pledged that's not his intention.
"Those rights right now are only being interpreted by one set of judges, and it could go another way by another set," Webster said. "There is a lot of protection for me and the philosophical bent I have in those rights."
Other lawmakers are contemplating, less than four months after the general election, whether state law should further regulate how signatures for citizen petitions are gathered. There were reports last year that paid petition-gatherers duped citizens into signing documents.
But if history is a guide, state lawmakers could have a hard time selling any plans that fundamentally change the Constitution or how it is amended.
Even if legislators agree this year on ballot questions for citizen initiatives, a myriad of public interest groups - from those pushing environmental issues to those advocating property tax rollbacks - will oppose them.
"This is nothing short of a power grab, pure and simple," said activist Rick Shepherd, who successfully pushed a term-limits initiative in Palm Beach County. Last year, he formed the Florida Initiative League to battle the Legislature's efforts to rein in citizen initiatives, drawing such disparate groups as the American Lung Association and the Florida Taxpayers Union.
For such groups, Florida's experiment in direct democracy has been a relief valve in a system where entrenched politicians often ignore public will. In recent years, citizen-initiated constitutional amendments such as banning public smoking, limiting the use of commercial fishing nets and capping class sizes came only after the Legislature failed to give those issues a serious hearing. And the advocacy groups warn that any further restrictions on petition-gathering could make it harder on grass-roots efforts - not the well-moneyed interests that lawmakers say they hope to curb.
"Unfortunately, I think we may have gone too many cycles to try to fix this," said Webster, a 25-year veteran of the Legislature. "But we have a statute book for a Constitution. We need to try."
But is a condensed state Constitution a pipe dream?
Former University of Florida Law School dean and former Democratic House Speaker Jon Mills thinks so. The U.S. Constitution is not a good model for a state, he says. It was a contract with sovereign states to limit the authority of the federal government. State constitutions, therefore, define the rest of government. They are contracts with citizens.
"Having a long state Constitution isn't necessarily a bad thing," said Mills, who in 1998 was a member of the state's Constitutional Revision Commission, a group appointed by the state Legislature and governor every 20 years to review the Constitution and propose changes. One of the changes voters approved in 1998, for example, shrank the Cabinet from six statewide elected officials to three.
But Mills agrees many sections of Florida's Constitution would be more at home in the state law books, such as the ban on caging pregnant pigs. But Florida voters don't have that option. Only the Legislature has the authority to write laws. All voters can do is amend the Constitution.
When state lawmakers got serious last year about changing how citizens can amend the Constitution, they dumped a key proposal that even opponents agree would ensure their success: creating a way for citizens to amend state law as well as the state Constitution.
"We've advocated for that for years," said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida. "If citizens were given the ability to enact statutes, I think must of us would get behind constitutional changes."
But Bush and then-Senate President Jim King, along with the state's business lobby, weren't interested, saying they worried it would just open the door wider to ill-conceived ideas.
They argued that citizen initiatives, limited to a single subject by the Constitution, avoid real debate and lead to bad policy. For example, voters aren't asked how to pay for amendments they approve.
Since last year, all citizen ballot measures include a fiscal impact statement, but Republican leaders say that doesn't go far enough, because citizens aren't asked directly if they want to raise taxes for the new measure or cut some other program.
Republicans have sought in recent years to control state spending and provide tax breaks - only to have that agenda threatened by citizen initiatives that could force more spending, such as the 2000 measure requiring the state to build a high-speed train. (Last year, Bush, using the same system he wants voters to curtail, successfully backed an initiative that repealed the train amendment.)
But in the waning hours of the 2004 legislative session, only one of three ballot questions to curtail citizen initiatives made it to the ballot: moving up the deadline for filing paperwork for an initiative petition from three months to nine months before Election Day. It drew little organized opposition, and voters approved it in November.
This year, however, legislative leaders are confident more measures will pass.
"I believe the general mood in the House and Senate is clear," said House Judiciary Chairman David Simmons, R-Longwood. "That was brought home on Nov. 2, 2004, when we saw special interests using the Constitution as leverage against each other. I mean, the people of state of Florida ended up being held hostage to special interests."
But the mood of voters may be different.
"I have to tell you that I very much admire your effort, yet I'm really rather skeptical," Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, a former legislator and Florida State University president, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month as it began contemplating Webster's grand plan to overhaul the Constitution. D'Alemberte was also a member of the 1978 Constitutional Revision Commission.
Any plans to make it harder for citizens to change the Constitution, D'Alemberte said, "brings out one large human emotion that I don't think we're going to be able to get over in a short period of time . . . distrust.
"From the beginning, we distrusted kings and royal governors . . . and people don't trust the Legislature to do what's right."
