"It was like finding a crocodile in your bathtub when you go to shave in the morning," Kaus said. "You know it's there, and you try not to think about it, but it's hard to think about much else while you're shaving."
The current court has resisted outside pressure. Despite threats of a recall, four justices in 1997 voted to overturn a state law that required parental consent for teenagers to obtain abortions. The ruling prompted a campaign to unseat Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Associate Justice Ming W. Chin. Both were forced to raise money and mount campaigns but survived handily.
The official Proposition 8 campaign has discouraged supporters from threatening a recall while the court is considering lawsuits to overturn the measure.
"We think the discussion of a recall at this point is premature and not helpful to the current situation," said Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for the campaign. "The court should have a chance to do the right thing."
But if the court voted to overturn Proposition 8, "no one would be able to stop" a recall, he said.
With the state and backers of Proposition 8 joining opponents in asking for immediate review, the court will find it difficult to dismiss the suits without a hearing or without referring them to lower courts. A decision to review the cases, however, would not necessarily mean that the court was in favor of the challenges.
The issue before the court is technical: whether Proposition 8 amounted to a sweeping revision of the state Constitution, which can be put on the ballot only by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature or a constitutional convention, or whether it was a more limited amendment, as its backers contended. Proposition 8 reached the ballot after a petition drive.
The court has defined a revision as a change in the fundamental structure or foundational power of state government or one that makes "far-reaching changes in the nature of our basic governmental plan."
Courts in Oregon and Alaska have rejected revision arguments in upholding anti-gay-marriage amendments, and the California Supreme Court has dismissed them in at least six challenges of initiatives, including measures that reinstated the death penalty, changed tax law (Proposition 13) and imposed term limits.
In 1948, the court overturned an initiative as an illegal revision because it made a wide array of changes in the state Constitution. And in 1990, the court struck down another initiative that would have required the courts to apply federal law when determining the rights of criminal defendants.
