If legislature gets its way, only it will be able to change state constitution

Right now the Florida Legislature is considering bills that would effectively close off two of the three primary ways in which the state constitution can be amended — the one remaining would be an amendment approved by the Florida Legislature.

The other two primary ways constitutional amendments can get on the ballot are through the petition process and the Constitution Revision Commission.

The Constitution Revision Commission, you may recall from the 2018 election, meets every 20 years to propose constitutional amendments. They ran into a bit of controversy last year when they chose to bundle amendments so, for example, you had to vote on whether to ban offshore oil drilling and indoor vaping, rather than treating them as separate subjects.

Bills requiring the commission to keep its amendments to a single subject are now moving through the legislature. The legislature and the petition process are already required to be single-subject. And, heck, maybe that’s a good idea. Some of those bundlings were just downright weird.

But another idea being kicked around in the legislature is to just do away with the commission entirely. Like the proposal to end bundling, that would require voter approval. Both ending the commission and ending bundling have made it fairly far through the process, with the bundling proposal having passed the Senate and abolishing the commission teed up for a vote in the House.

But wait, there’s more. The legislature also wants to make it harder for the petition process.

In the last three election cycles, Floridians have made some major changes to the constitution through organizations gathering enough petitions — more than 766,000 — to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot.

In 2014, voters approved an amendment requiring the legislature to spend a portion of real estate taxes on buying and managing land. In 2016, there was the medical marijuana amendment. And in 2018, felons gained the right to vote after having completed their sentences.

In all three cases, the legislature implemented these amendments in ways that went against the spirit of the amendment, according to people associated with the campaigns to pass them.

Now, the House Judiciary Committee has drafted a bill that would require petition gatherers to be Florida residents and not be paid based on the number of petitions gathered. Those rules would have doomed the medical marijuana and voting reform amendments, both of which relied on outof-state petition-gathering companies to get the job done. The committee passed its bill Thursday morning. It still has to be assigned to other committees. A similar bill will be heard Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

By abolishing the Constitutional Revision Commission and choking off the only means of petition gathering that has proven effective in recent years, the Florida Legislature will ensure that only lawmakers themselves have the ability to propose state constitutional amendments.

It’s not hard to see why. While their are exceptions in the Republican majority that fully support some of these ideas, for the most part, felony voting rights, medical marijuana and more land buying are not exactly priorities in the overwhelmingly conservative Florida Legislature.