Despite some activists' anger over Proposition 8, voters are unlikely to restrict their own power to tinker with the state's most important legal document, experts said. Voters could make it more difficult to amend the Constitution by requiring larger margins at the polls or approval by two-thirds of the Legislature.
At least five commissions have been formed during the past 20 years to look at the initiative process, and not one measure to change it has made it to the ballot, said Fred Silva, senior fiscal policy advisor at California Forward, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group concerned with fiscal reform and state governance.
"There are people on both sides who don't want anything done -- both liberals and conservatives," said Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies.
Still, the state budget fiasco has made constitutional reform a more pressing issue, and even if voters refuse to change the initiative process, Stern believes "the public is ready for an examination of the Constitution."
An initiative expected to qualify for next year's ballot would authorize a constitutional convention, where delegates could take a red pencil to the state's massive tome.
Stern cited a daylong conference on constitutional reform held in Sacramento in February. Attendees had to pay $89 for admission, he said. More than 400 people showed up and some had to be turned away.
"I was stunned," he said.
When voters amend the Constitution, the state high court can overturn the amendment only if it decides it was a more sweeping revision, which must be put on the ballot by a constitutional convention or two-thirds vote of the Legislature, or because it violated the federal Constitution.
The court concluded that Proposition 8 was not an impermissible revision because it did not alter the governmental plan or framework.
But given the court's historic May 15, 2008, ruling affirming the right of gays and lesbians to wed, the court might well have found the measure violated federal constitutional equal protection guarantees.
Anti-Proposition 8 lawyers did not pursue that argument, however, fearing that a reversal in the U.S. Supreme Court would set the marriage movement back decades.
