Referendum C Continues to Reverberate

By Howard Rothman, 11-09-05

It's been a week since Colorado voters approved Referendum C and called a time-out on the most restrictive provision of the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights. But potential national repercussions keep surfacing. The big news on this front was yesterday's decisive rejection of a state-spending limit in California, although analysts aren't quite sure if Colorado's November 1 vote or Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rapidly fading popularity were to blame. Elsewhere around the U.S., however, opponents and proponents of similar legislation and referenda continue debating the issue -- and the implications of a "no" vote by those who have lived with the draconian restrictions of TABOR for more than a decade.

I think the most salient reaction to the Ref C and California's Tuesday vote came from Pennsylvania, where an official with the local Budget and Policy Center said that State Assembly should likewise seek fiscal solutions "free of political gimmicks." A study by this group, in fact, suggests Pennsylvania's state spending would have been cut by nearly one-quarter -- necessitating "drastic cuts in state police funding, environmental protection, higher education, job creation, and other programs" had such a proposal been enacted.

Elsewhere, the Colorado results were used to buoy arguments against similar measures in Missouri, where the executive director of the state's Budget Project cautioned locals to take heed of Ref C; Wisconsin, where a columnist for the University of Wisconsin's student newspaper lauded our vote last week as TABOR's "death by democracy"; Oklahoma, where an editorial pleaded with locals to pay attention to the fact that Coloradoans "totally discredited" the essence of a similar idea being circulated there; and Virginia, where our vote was seen as sending shivers down the spine of Grover Norquist.

Not all of the reaction has been so negative, of course. Witness a web community called The Common Voice, where Nevada-based writer Doug French claims (rightly) that TABOR is far from dead despite Ref C -- but then goes on to opine (wrongly) that a similar proposal should still be enacted in his state.

French and his neighbors may yet have the chance to make that happen. In addition to Nevada and the locales mentioned above, tax-cut advocates in Kansas, Ohio and Maine also are still considering similar measures. [End of article]