Court Opinion

ID: 9592556
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:15:17.60581+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:17.000462
License: Public Domain

RANSOM, Justice, specially concurring. I concur in the opinion we file today and write specially only to acknowledge that by sterile formula we could have denied the petition. Whether two or more measures within an amendment are interdependent is determined in the first instance by the rational choice of the legislature to join them as such. To that choice we defer notwithstanding the strong merits of any argument that the measures rationally may be separated. Chavez, 108 N.M. at 48, 766 P.2d at 308. Operational dependence is not required. Joinder may be a matter of expediency. As urged by the horse-racing interests as intervenors, the people and their elected representatives, in regard for what is politic, logically could have decided to amend the Constitution to express a choice for a state-operated lottery only on condition that a private right to wager on video machine games of chance is recognized by the Constitution. The horsemen argue that a lottery without video gaming would kill horse racing. However, in shielding “the heart of the amendment process mandated by the people in the adoption of their Constitution,” id., this Court cannot rule by abstract logic. For the reasons so ably expressed by Justice Frost in our opinion today, in the faithful and impartial discharge of our own Constitutional duties we must believe that neither the legislature nor the people in fact thought a mere advisory vote in support of a state-operated lottery should be dependent upon the grant of a private constitutional right to video gaming.