Words against CI-105

I’ll be voting against CI-105, the initiative proposing a constitutional amendment, and for what it’s worth, here’s why.

    I am a big fan of constitutions.  I don’t think most of us stop often enough to consider that it is our constitutions, from the national to the local, which more than any other aspect of American life keep us from the violence and chaos we see in so many other places.

    I am also a big fan of narrow interpretation of constitutions.  Granted, circumstances change, sometimes dramatically, but human nature and motives don’t change much at all.  Constitutions shouldn’t change any faster than does that nature or those motives.  If we stretch our interpretations or change the wording of our constitutions every time a few folks get riled up, we don’t have a constitution.   Rather, we have Calvinball on the grand scale, promoting rather than preventing political disintegration.  Conservatives have long understood this better than have liberals, and from that history should be rallying against CI-105.

    Following the same general reasoning, I will vote against calling a Montana constitutional convention. 

    Whatever perceived flaws our state constitution has, they don’t rise to the level of needing a re-write.  Furthermore, the current political climate is so adversarial I have no confidence that a truly thoughtful and unbiased committee could be found to deal objectively with an opened constitution.   A constitutional convention in this climate would become a Calvinball Superbowl, with plenty of special-interest money, trash talk, bright lights, cheap high drama, perhaps even some wardrobe malfunctions.

    But it would not be good for Montana.