Court Opinion

ID: 9746175
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:05:59.73894+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:10.257820
License: Public Domain

BLEASE, Acting P. J.
concur in the opinion and the judgment.
I write separately to emphasize the speciousness of the state’s argument. The state claims that it has amended an initiative statute by passing legislation in conflict with it, a patent absurdity.
The 1988 tobacco tax initiative (the Act) specifies the percentages of the fund it creates that may be appropriated for specified purposes from its accounts. (Rev. & Tax. Code, §§ 30122, 30124.)1 The state concedes that Assembly Bill No. 816 (1993-1994 Reg. Sess.) appropriates money in amounts that exceed the percentage limitations of section 30124 without amending the section, i.e., it concedes the Legislature violated the Act. Notwithstanding, the state baldly asserts that Assembly Bill No. 816 amends the Cigarette and Tobacco Products Surtax Fund because it satisfies the four-fifths vote requirement of the initiative and is consistent with its purposes. (§ 30130.) The state is utterly confused on a simple point of law.
There is only one means of amending a statutory enactment. “A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section is reenacted as amended.” (Cal. Const., art. IV, § 9.) This requires that the change be shown in the *752language of the affected statute. That did not occur here. Whether the Legislature intended to amend section 30124 is immaterial; it did not do so. The road to illegality is paved with such intentions.
Failing an amendment, the state seeks refuge in the doctrine of amendment by implication. The purpose of the doctrine is to resolve conflicts in enactments of equal legal status, not to provide another means of “amendment.” It expresses the rule that a later enactment may prevail over an earlier, conflicting enactment of the same legal status in respects the conflict. The rule does not apply where the later enactment is legally subordinate to the earlier enactment, that is, where a conflict is ruled out by the superior legal status of the earlier enactment.
The Act has superior legal status for two independent reasons. First, the Act creates the tobacco tax fund and directs the amounts which may be appropriated from the fund. Second, since the Act was enacted as an initiative statute, which has superior legal status to ordinary legislation, no legislative enactment may conflict with it. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 10, subd. (c).) The sole means of change is an amendment which meets the requirements of the Act. {Ibid.; § 30130.)
Scotland, J., concurred.

All references to a section are to the Revenue and Taxation Code.