If it was in place, these wouldn’t have passed

In Arizona, the proposal of a supermajority threshold was introduced as recently as the 2015 legislative session, although HCR 2001 didn’t make it even out of committee. It sought to refer to voters a measure that would impose a 60 percent approval level for a constitutional amendment.

A supermajority threshold would have sunk the Voter Protection Act (52.3 percent), the 1998 measure that still rankles Republican lawmakers because it makes it virtually impossible for the Legislature to repeal or meaningfully change a voter-approved initiative.

But a supermajority standard would not be without risks for political causes, Republican or Democratic. Some notable constitutional-amendment measures in the past 20 years have passed but not met a supermajority threshold. Last year’s nail-biter Prop. 123, the education-funding proposal brokered by Gov. Doug Ducey, comes to mind (50.9 percent). As does Prop. 118 in 2014, which established a permanent fund for a guaranteed annual payment to schools from the state land trust (50.5 percent). Or Prop. 103 in 2000 that expanded the Arizona Corporation Commission to five members and reduced their terms to four years (53 percent).

All of them were referred to the ballot by state lawmakers.

Indeed, lost in the Amendment 71 debate was that, for all the animus directed at out-of-state special interests for their assault on Colorado’s Constitution, more than two-thirds of the 152 amendments over the years were referred to the ballot by the Legislature.

Nonetheless, backers managed to make the so-called “Raise the Bar” measure a referendum on environmental groups’ efforts to ban or limit fracking in natural-gas production through the ballot box. The parallel in Arizona, of course, is the minimum wage measure Prop. 206 that spurred businesses and lawmakers’ push to curb citizen initiatives.

It’s difficult to tease out whether it’s the by-district signature requirement or the supermajority threshold that carried the day for Amendment 71. But underpinning both concepts is the belief that the spigot on citizen initiatives needs dramatic tightening.

Voters in Colorado bought the argument. Would we in Arizona?