This is a clear example of how the unions really control California.
Here are some fun incorrect varieties:
* Prop 22 needs 7/8 of legislators to vote against to repeal
* Prop 22 needs 7/8 of Californian voters to vote against to repeal
* Prop 22 needs 7/8 of Californians to modify
And now, this profound version
* Californian legislators can pass laws that require 7/8 majorities to repeal and AB5 is one of them
And it's actually a good thing, without that clause it would be totally impossible for the legislative to amend or repeal the proposition.
This boggles my mind about initiatives in California. In other states with popular initiatives, the People pass laws on the same footing as the Legislature; they just do so through the ballot box. The elected Legislature still has the authority to modify those same laws (though most states require a "cooling off" period of a year or two before a passed initiative can be modified, and even then a supermajority in the Legislature can still do it).
A popular initiative being sacrosanct and inviolable absent a second initiative seems wrong to me. Why does a populist law get to stand more firm than one passed by the elected representatives of the people?
I expect you know the answer to this. Just look at what happened with the restoration of voting rights to felons in Florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_F...
65% of Floridian voters chose to restore voting rights to felons; the Florida legislature chose to add additional restrictions to that restoration that were not in the original proposition, effectively preventing the restoration that Floridians had chosen.
Isn't that exactly what you should expect from a democrat state though? (i.e. democracy = popular vote; republic = elected representatives)
China, Russia, USA, France and Switzerland are all republics: two are dictatorships, two are representative democracies, and one is a direct democracy. Canada, UK, Japan and Belgium are all constitutional monarchies, and all of them are considered democratic. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are monarchies, but certainly not democratic.
Democracy is a scale, probably better used as an adjective: the more democratic, the more power is wielded by the people.
Your answer is right there in the declaration of independence: "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". Rather than going through the legislative process, the idea is that some things should be decided by the people directly.
The original intent of ballot initiatives (propositions) was to try to nullify special interest power over the legislature. If you think AB5 was special-interest legislation (it very clearly was) this might be the exact intended use of the ballot initiative process. For the popular vote to nullify what the special interest-controlled legislature wanted. And it worked.
An entirely separate question is what kind of questions should be decided by direct democracy in the first place. I think California goes too far in this regard, but I don't think the right answer is "none". Regardless of one's political beliefs, I think something on the scale of Brexit was put to the electorate in a direct vote, and probably with reason.
Because the people only vote once in two years and the reps vote all the time. Because the people need to collect 50k signatures and usually more and the reps need zero. This is obvious.
This is only partially true. Props are not amendable or repealable by default, but the 7/8 majority is a completely arbitrary and an unprecedentedly high burden to put on this. It is so high that it basically only exists so that people can argue that it is technically amendable or repealable while it being nearly impossible in practice. Prop 22 could have easily set a more reasonable cutoff like 2/3 even 3/4.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/11/california-passes-assembly-b...
Also in the legislative world there is a huge difference between 61-16 and what would be a 68-9 requirement to meet a 7/8 cutoff. The goal for these cutoffs should be to make it difficult to achieve, not practically impossible.
No, it's not an unprecedentedly high burden. You just admitted that the default burden is much higher!
That wasn't my position. My position is that a 88% threshold in practice might as well be 101% and it is dishonest to include it and pretend like it is the near equivalent of 70%.
My comment on the pedantry was mostly on the fact that a lack of threshold is a null value and not equivalent to 101%. A null value is not larger than 88%. This 88% value is higher than previous propositions that have included a threshold and is therefore "unprecedentedly high".