Court Opinion

ID: 9600823
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:31:46.410677+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:37:27.702060
License: Public Domain

OP ALA, Justice,
concurring in result.
The court declares today that the initiative measure under consideration — which in substance would limit the total amount of ad valorem tax that could be levied on a parcel of real property and allow increases only under specified conditions — qualifies for submission to a vote of the people and revises part b of the ballot title to more accurately explain (a) the number of votes required to raise ad valorem taxes and (b) when elections to raise ad valorem taxes must be held. While I concur in clearing the measure for an election, I write separately to reiterate ■my views on the outer limit of permissible -scrutiny an initiative measure may undergo when it is before us upon a challenge for alleged legal deficiency.
I would not undertake to test the validity of a measure’s content before its adoption by a vote of the people. My commitment to the undiluted force of Threadgill v. Cross1 continues with undiminished fervor:2 Threads *1154gill teaches that conformity of a measure’s content to the commands of our constitution — state and federal — may not be judicially examined in advance of the initiative petition’s adoption by the people. Presubmission review of a measure’s fundamental-law conformity should be confined to fatally vitiating infirmities in the initiative process itself. The electorate’s effort at legislating directly must not be hindered by pre-election attacks other than those which target the petition’s compliance with some sine qua non requirement for submission.
While on its journey to the ballot box a measure proposed by initiative petition is entitled to the same judicial deference that is accorded a legislative bill in progress. Judges cannot police the lawmaking process for conformity to the constitution without raising an impermissible restraint on the free exercise of political activities.3 Just as the passage of a seemingly infirm bill in progress will not be enjoined to save the cost of processing the act through the Houses of the Legislature, so, too, an initiative that passes muster for submission should not be condemned in advance of the measure’s adoption just to avoid a costly election. The burden or loss borne by the people when an election fails because the law is later held invalid is the price to be paid for our system of constitutional democracy that authorizes the electorate to legislate directly.4 Only in the clearest case of firmly settled and stable constitutional jurisprudence that absolutely condemns a proposed measure as facially impossible of enforcement, application or execution — and then only if the protestants have standing to complain of constitutional infirmity — should this court ever undertake to trump an initiative petition that otherwise meets submission requirements.
The measure under consideration is fit for submission; I hence concur in the court’s rejection of the petitioners’ constitutional challenge but not in today’s pronouncement.

. 26 Okl. 403, 109 P. 558 (1910).

. My unswerving commitment to Threadgill, supra note 1, is documented in several reported decisions. See In re Initiative Petition No. 360, Okl., 879 P.2d 810, 821 (1994) (Opala, J., concurring in result); In re Initiative Petition No. 358, Okl., 870 P.2d 782, 788 (1994) (Opala, J., concurring in result); In re Initiative Petition No. 349, *1154Okl., 838 P.2d 1, 18 (1992) (Opala, C.J., dissenting); In re Initiative Petition No. 348, Okl., 820 P.2d 772, 781 (1991) (Opala, C.J., concurring in result); In re Initiative Petition No. 347, Okl., 813 P.2d 1019, 1037 (1991) (Opala, C.J., concurring); In re Initiative Petition No. 341, Okl., 796 P.2d 267, 275 (1990) (Opala, V.C.J., concurring in result); In re Initiative Petition No. 317, Okl., 648 P.2d 1207, 1222 (1982) (Opala, J., concurring in the judgment); In re Initiative Petition No. 315, Okl., 649 P.2d 545, 554-555 (1982) (Opala, J., concurring in result); see also In re Initiative Petition No. 349 (No. 76,437, Feb. 20, 1991) (Opala, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (unpublished opinion).

. Advocacy for or against a proposed law is the purest form of political speech. Restraint upon free speech is prohibited by the terms of Art. 2, § 22, Old. Const., which provide in part:
"Every person may freely speak, write, or publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right...."

. The constitutional provisions governing the initiative and referendum are Art. 5, §§ 1-8, Okl. Const. The terms of § 1 are:
“The Legislative authority of the State shall be vested in a Legislature, consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives; but the people reserve to themselves the power to propose laws and amendments to the Constitution and to enact or reject the same at the polls independent of the Legislature, and also reserve power at their own option to approve or reject at the polls any act of the Legislature." (Emphasis added.)
In Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Smith, Okl., 610 P.2d 794, 807 (1980), we stated that Art. 5, §§ 1, 2 and 7, Okl. Const., together “comprise an initiative system whereby both the people and the Legislature may propose legislation independently, and neither can block the effort of the other during the process....” (Emphasis added.) Our teaching in Smith applies with equal force to bar judicial as well as legislative interference with initiative process. Courts should be loath to impose judicial restraint on the electorate’s power to make law. As the Arizona Supreme Court aptly remarked in State v. Osborn, 16 Ariz. 247, 248, 143 P. 117, 118 (1914), to place court-imposed restrictions "would be tantamount to claiming the power of life and death over every initiated measure by the people. It would limit the right of the people to propose only valid laws, whereas the other lawmaking body, the Legislature, would go untrammeled as to the legal soundness of its measures.”