Protecting and restoring the integrity of the Oregon Constitution certainly isn’t a new idea, but now that we know our friends in the tobacco industry are willing to put up millions of dollars in order to keep the Constitution sacred, I believe now is the time to push for a new way of thinking about our state’s foundational document.

Our crappy constitution

As the No on 50 campaign has so effectively pointed out, it’s terrifyingly easy to amend the state’s constitution. All that is required is for someone to put up enough money to get an amendment on the ballot, and then it just needs approval of 50 percent plus one of the voters who turn out for that election. For instance, in an off-year election, like the one we’re currently in, voter turnout can be as low as 30 percent. If a ballot measure amendment gets a bare majority of the vote, that means that as few as 16 percent of registered voters were able to change the state’s constitution.

Compare that process with that required to amend the U.S. Constitution—a supermajority in both houses of congress, and then a supermajority by the states. And even in more rationally thinking states, the process is difficult and designed to protect the constitution from the shifting whims of the majority.

Why establish different rules for changing the constitution than simply changing statutory law? Simple: Constitutions are designed to be guiding documents that enshrine deeply and widely held principles of society, as well as a clear descriptions of how government should function—and what government can and cannot ever do to the populace. In Oregon, though, there’s essentially no separation between statutory law and the constitution, and much of the state’s constitution is riddled with clauses that clearly belong in the Oregon Revised Statutes, not a foundational document (vehicle taxes on mobile homes, anyone?).

The solution seems obvious: We need to change the rules by which the state’s constitution can be amended, and set the bar far higher than it currently is in order to keep the worst side effects of mob rule out. There are a number of ways that can be done, and I don’t think any of them are necessarily any better than the others. We could institute a 2/3 or 3/5 majority, or even a double majority, like we do for increases in property taxes, that would require that at a majority of registered voters turn out in order for an amendment to pass. Or we could require majority votes on two consecutive general elections, or that all amendments go through the legislature first, or that the legislature has a chance to propose an alternative amendment.

But that creates a massive problem—any change that makes it harder to amend the constitution effectively locks in all of the nutty, out of place, and “unconstitutional” amendments that have been passed through ballot measures in the past 103 years, since it would be more difficult to take them out than it was to put them in.

And that’s why I’m calling for an entire Constitutional Convention in 2009, which would bring together past and present legislators, former Oregon Supreme Court justices, law professors, municipal leaders, etc., to completely revise the constitution by removing clauses that are clearly statutory, and giving the state back and actual constitution. The proposed changes would need to go through the necessary process, but I’d advocate for annual legislative sessions and an increased budget for legislators and their staffs in order to ensure a professional lawmaking body.

And since we know this is such an important issue for the tobacco industry, I believe they’ll help fund the effort—the Philip Morris/R.J. Reynolds Constitutional Convention of 2009. Who’s with me?