The high-speed rail initiative that the voters narrowly ratified last year ought to have provoked Florida legislators into more than a half-hearted effort to comply. It should also have energized them, as the net ban initiative should have six years earlier, into trying to protect the Constitution from any more inappropriate clutter. But the Legislature once again slept through the opportunity. Now look: One nationwide group of animal welfare activists is promoting an amendment to protect pregnant pigs in Florida from being confined in the cages that hog farmers call "gestation crates," while another means to make it an offense against the Florida Constitution to smoke in most "enclosed indoor workplaces."

Whatever the merits of those causes, they do not belong in the Constitution. The Constitution is difficult to amend (though, obviously, not difficult enough) because it is meant to establish and govern fundamental relationships between citizens and government. Few of Florida's initiatives, whether successful or not, have risen to that level of dignity.

In one of the examples at hand, Florida's Constitution would be stuffed with such trivial detail as a 101-word definition of a "stand-alone bar," which would be exempt from the smoking ban.

The problem is not simply that it is too easy for anyone with enough money or dedicated volunteers to get a cause on the ballot. It is also that they have no way to do it except by tinkering with the Constitution.

Sandra Mortham, serving then as secretary of state, proposed four years ago to expand the initiative process to allow the public to make its own laws in essentially the same way -- by petitions calling for a referendum -- as it can now make constitutional amendments. The Legislature was, of course, uninterested in sharing any more power with the public, but the idea was ripe for adoption by the Constitution Revision Commission, which had its own access to the ballot. Regrettably, the commission regarded anything to do with initiatives as too hot to handle, and nothing came of Mortham's constructive suggestion.

Several variations are possible, including an option that would give the Legislature one chance to pass a law complying with the purpose of a petition before it goes to the ballot. Meanwhile, the threshold for amending the Constitution, which is pegged to 8 percent of the last presidential vote and currently means 488,722 valid signatures, could be set higher.

Initiatives that trivialize and damage the Constitution will continue to fester so long as their sponsors have no alternative. The oath all legislators take, to support, protect and defend that Constitution, should oblige them to act in this regard.

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