Mississippi justices toss voter-backed marijuana initiative

ap ^

[Svartalfiar]

The ruling rewrites the law no matter how you rule.
And this ruling does away with citizen initiatives which is a much greater rewriting of the law.

How does this decision rewrite the law? NobleFree posted the fuller text of the Constitution in 17: Each district is only allowed to contribute up to 1/5 of the minimum signatures required for the initiative. If the State now has fewer than five districts, then the exact wording of the Constitution does not allow for this process. No rewriting required. Obviously the law adding this process to their Constitution was poorly worded, but that is exactly what it says.

On the other side though, if MS suddenly gained tons of people and now had 20 districts, enough signatures from only five of them would be able to put questions on the popular ballot. Even with none from the other 15.

[algore]

yep, that makes more sense.

I live in another state where they have made it less blatantly impossible to have a citizen initiative.

thanks

[Farcesensitive]

The clear and obvious intent of the law is to allow the people to have initiatives placed on the ballot.
The ruling makes it impossible to place initiatives on the ballot based on a technicality.

A few days ago citizens could place initiatives on the ballot and now they can’t because of a deliberate decision of judges.
That is judges rewriting the law.

[Svartalfiar]

The clear and obvious intent of the law is to allow the people to have initiatives placed on the ballot.
The ruling makes it impossible to place initiatives on the ballot based on a technicality.

A few days ago citizens could place initiatives on the ballot and now they can’t because of a deliberate decision of judges.
That is judges rewriting the law.

...It's not a technicality, it's the exact wording of the Constitution. There's lots of laws that may have a certain intent, but due to idiots writing them, or nefarious Senators slipping something in, they don't do what they're supposed to. But that's the thing about law - it needs to be precise and specific. The problem isn't the judges simply reading the text, the problem is the idiots that wrote it not thinking about what might happen come census time.

A few days ago the citizens still couldn't legally initiate a ballot item, they haven't been legally able to do that since re-apportionment from the 2000 census. It just hadn't been legally determined until now.