Florida bill raising amendment adoption threshold to two-thirds advances

(The Center Square) – Florida voters may see yet another ballot measure asking them to make it more difficult for themselves to get citizen initiatives proposing Constitutional amendments adopted.

Companion Senate-House resolutions would ask voters to raise the current 60% adoption threshold to 66.67%, or two-thirds, in a proposed 2022 ballot measure.

Both are assigned only two committee hearings each, one fewer than the standard vetting legislation receives before reaching chambers for floor votes – an indication that Republican leadership in the GOP-dominated Legislature favors the proposal.

House Joint Resolution 61, sponsored by Rep. Rick Roth, R-West Palm Beach, is awaiting hearings before the House Public Integrity & Elections and Judiciary committees.

But Senate Joint Resolution 1238, filed by Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, R-Doral, secured its first hearing approval Tuesday when the Senate Ethics & Elections Committee advanced the measure in a 5-3 partisan vote.

SJR 1238 has only one hearing before the Senate Rules Committee to reach the chamber for a floor vote with plenty of time remaining in the 60-day legislative session that began March 2.

Senate Ethics & Elections Chair Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Lady Lake, said the proposal does not change the Constitution, nor are lawmakers going to make this decision.

“The voters will vote as to whether they want to make this change,” he said.

That’s baloney, snorted Sen. Randolph Bracy, D-Ocoee, noting the Republican-dominated Legislature has been on a campaign to make citizen initiative petition drives increasingly complex and expensive, and adopting them more difficult.

The proposed elevation from 60% to 66.67% is a “direct result of constitutional amendments passing that you all don’t like,” Bracy said.

Florida voters have approved 15 of 18 constitutional amendments on the 2018 and 2020 ballots.

In 2018, 11 of 12 passed but only the constitutional amendments seeking to end greyhound racing, ban oil drilling and workplace vaping, tighten lobbying restrictions and make it harder to expand gambling would have passed under the proposed two-thirds requirement.

Last November, voters approved four of six proposed amendments. The only one that would not have met the 66.67 percent threshold was the one that has Republican lawmakers in an uproar — Amendment 2, which raises the state’s minimum wage from $8.46 an hour to $10 in September 2021 with $1 increases annually until it is $15 in 2026.

Rodriguez said raising the threshold to two-thirds will ensure changes to the state constitution are supported by a significant majority of voters because constitutions should be difficult to amend.

“Constitutions are fundamentally protections from the people and the government,” Rodriguez said. “This bill makes sure that a broader group of our citizens must approve changes that are near-permanent.”

Turning to Bracy she continued, “So I would disagree with what you’re suggesting, respectfully.”

Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami, proposed an amendment to SJR 1238 that would require a two-thirds vote of lawmakers to approve ballot measure resolutions noting it is the Legislature, not the people who most frequently attempt to amend the constitution.

If the purpose is to limit amendments to the constitution – and we just heard the vast majority of them, 118, have been passed by the Legislature – all methods of amendments should be limited,” she said.

The amendment failed.

Under the proposed ballot measure, repealing an amendment now encoded into the Constitution would require the same threshold as what applied when it was adopted. Amendments adopted under the 60% threshold could be repealed by the same margin.

Of the two 2020 ballot measures that failed, a proposed amendment placed before voters by the Legislature requiring ballot measures be adopted twice to be encoded into the constitution garnered less than 48% of the vote.

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