Opinion ID: 1349690
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: threadgill and its progeny

Text: Threadgill, which enjoyed full and unlimited sway from 1910 until 1975, [5] teaches that an initiative petition need only pass a procedural threshold test to qualify for submission to a vote of the people. It must (a) be in substantial compliance with the sine qua non procedural requirements for submission and bear the requisite number of valid signatures, [6] (b) address but a single subject [7] and (c) deal with a subject not explicitly excluded from the people's lawmaking power. [8] Unless a fatal procedural impediment be found in one of these categories, a petition must be cleared for a vote. All constitutional challenges to an initiative's content will be postponed to await the measure's adoption as enforceable law. They may later be pressed in the context of a lively forensic controversy between antagonistic adversaries by parties with legal standing to sue. [9] Threadgill should be kept in full force because it raises a necessary barrier of insulation between the judicial department's judicature and the people's lawmaking. The former is a function of judges, the latter of the people. Any departure from the basic teachings of Threadgill creates an impermissible burden on the people's fundamental-law power to initiate and pass measures that may change the state's constitution as well as her statutes.