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> 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?

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> 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.

I think the whole initiative process is horrible. But.

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.

The problem is that California very frequently gets into situations where there's a legislative supermajority on the opposite side of the issue from the general public. Just this cycle, AB5 passed the Assembly with 76%, and ACA 5 (the subject of Prop 16) passed with 81%. If the legislature were allowed to repeal ballot propositions, they'd do it in a heartbeat, and the will of the voters would not end up being expressed.

> Why does a populist law get to stand more firm than one passed by the elected representatives of the people?

Isn't that exactly what you should expect from a democrat state though? (i.e. democracy = popular vote; republic = elected representatives)

Direct democracy = popular vote, representative democracy = 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.

A republic is just a non-monarchy. It doesn’t imply anything else about the government of the state in question.

It's not a terrible idea for a law by referendum to require a higher legislative bar for repeal, as other replies have pointed out. But you do bring up a good point. Maybe the supermajority requirement should phase out after a certain number of years (in addition to a cooling off period).

> Why does a populist law get to stand more firm than one passed by the elected representatives of the people?

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.

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