Court Opinion

ID: 9719846
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:06:40.145255+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:10.619465
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring). Mr. Justice Holmes, writing at the time in another politically momentous “great case” (Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 US 197 [24 S Ct 436, 48 L ed 679]), has provided an appropriate introduction to this consequential showdown between an emergency-tagged statute and a restrictive provision of our Constitution. We refer to this writing of more than a half century ago (pp 400, 401):
“Great eases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful, and before which even well settled principles of law will bend. What we have to do in this case is to find the meaning of some not very difficult words. We must try, I have tried, to do it with the same freedom of *561natural and spontaneous ■ interpretation that one would be sure of if the same question arose upon an indictment for a similar act which excited no public attention and was of importance only to a prisoner before the court.”
Some recent history is in order. Last winter, and .at least until it became too late to submit to the people today’s constitutional question, everything debated in this case of Lockwood was seemingly clear throughout the legislative halls of the Capitol. This is evident from the journals of House and Senate, to which reference shall presently be made. No one seems then to have doubted that the people were possessed of right to regard this constitutional tax limitation* as remaining in fully understood effect unless and until, acting at the polls, they should choose ,to repeal or modify its terms. The limitation prohibits legislation designed to increase the original rate of taxation upon and against what people know for what it really is: the ordinary transaction of purchase and sale, at retail, of tangible personal property. But Michigan’s financial crisis grew to .alarming proportions. Election day passed without legislative agreement upon any one of the suggested ways of obtaining relief — at the polls — from the limitation. The legislature thereupon decided to and did levy an additional tax of l°/o on all such transactions by amendment of the use tax law, not the sales tax law. Its action is shown by PA 1959, No .263. A rather manifest question of constitutional law was thus left for judicial consideration, the legislature not having sought relevant advices of the attorney general and the question having been repeatedly raised on the floor of each house prior to the enactment.
*562All these events, and the rather obvious consequences of financial difficulty that are due to attend a judicial determination that the new tax collides with the quoted limitation, have in the words of Holmes brought down upon this Court “a kind of hydraulic pressure” which seemingly makes doubtful, in some respected legal minds, that which was so clearly understandable heretofore.
As in the Northern Securities Case, what we have now to do is to find the meaning and purpose of some not very difficult words; words appearing in the Constitution — not the statute before us. Once that meaning and purpose is ascertained, the remainder of our task presents but little difficulty. Our judgment then becomes the determination, not of a great case but of a case the decision of which should have been (and must yet be if it is to be decided as the legislature would have it) referred to the people on general election day.
The real question in this case — the decisive question — is not the brilliantly argued yet irrelevant point that there was and is a known difference between sales and use taxes. Of course there is a difference. Legislation hitherto effective in our State makes the distinction clear, and so we tug not at that oar, which at best would turn us around and about in aimless circles. Rather, our task as primary guardians of the Constitution is to determine whether the legislature may — the quoted restriction considered and interpreted — impose the present sales tax levy and a use tax levy upon each transaction of retail sale without offending this simply written and pointed restriction on the power of taxation of such transactions.
Phrasing the question so — and it seems the only honest way of phrasing it unless we are to shut our eyes to and see not that which all of the people of our State have clearly perceived and understood — t *563we find no difficulty in holding that said Act No 263, to the extent shown in Mr. Justice Smith’s opinion, collides with and falls before the Constitution.
Mr. Justice Smith has considered and lucidly covered the strict legal phases of the case. But more remains to be said concerning the actual reason for our present disagreement. That we now undertake. We shall also here and there insert a few observations in defense of all constitutional limitations .against erosion or defeat by judicial as well as legislative misconception or misunderstanding of settled rules of constitutional law.

Why the Divisive Opinions in this Case?

Prior to the people-initiated amendment of 1939,* judges and justices of Michigan courts of record were nominated and elected as partisan party candidates. The amendment purposefully changed all this, yet by continued inaction of the legislature, members of this Court — even though elected by the nonpartisan “separate judicial ballot” — are still nominated as partisans at partisan party conventions. Naturally, this situation has brought to our Court judicial officers the nomination or successive nominations of whom have been made by different political parties. Until corrected it continues to bring up a subject we would open and dwell upon before it is re-opened after the opinions in this case are handed down.
We divide in this case. Our veteran Brothers adhere to the ways of metaphysical, rather than understandable, interpretation of constitutional restriction upon the legislative power of taxation. *564This they do despite Bacon’s* recent guide to the authoritative view. Manifestly, then, and no matter how devoutly our elders may protest otherwise, and no matter the corresponding protestations of newcomers seated here, these divisive opinions are bound to appear — we say “appear” — to some thoughtful folk as well as the cynics of professional politics as having been induced by considerations other than those of orderly constitutional interpretation. This is not good for the Court and it is not good for society. Hence we feel constrained to record this unusual statement of reasons why 5 of our members find themselves bound to rule as they do.† There-must be no misunderstanding of our division.
These words are not addressed to partisans, who-will no doubt fulminate despite this message, but are addressed solely to the people, to those whose honest interest is that of appraising our divergent views and ascertaining the real reasons for the divergence.
Whatever the ensuing noisy clamor of politics and the forthcoming arguments of necessity grounded, on Michigan’s acknowledged financial emergency,, we do not consider the one and cannot consider the other. Necessity is the “argument of tyrants, the-creed of slaves.” Like the fabled judge of the old West, it knows no law. And an emergency can never create legislative power. It may, at best, call into-exercise “a living power already enjoyed.” (Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 US 398, 426 [54 S Ct 231, 78 L ed 413, 88 ALR 1481].) In this case no such power lives. It was slain by the Constitution.
*565Our Constitution being the primary object of the present inquiry, we have read and listened throughout the presentation of this case with the historic twin admonitions of Marshall and Cooley constantly in mind. “We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding;”* we shall not “subject these instruments, which in the main only undertake to lay down broad general principles, to a literal and technical construction, as if they were great public enemies standing in the way of progress.” (People, ex rel. Bay City, v. State Treasurer, 23 Mich 499, 506, quoted post at greater length.)
Each provision of a State Constitution is the direct word of the people of the State, not that of the scriveners thereof. It is the State’s voice of democracy. So, when called upon as we now are to expound the meaning and effect thereof in the instance of a tax controversy, our single concern — our undeviating inquiry — is easily refined to and defined by simple questions. We proceed to ask some of them. What meaning and purpose did the people themselves have in mind when they considered and ratified the provision in question? What did the people, having ratified it, have a right to expect from it in the way of protection from further taxation? What meaning did the words “naturally convey to the popular mind” ? What is the sense, of the words in question, “most obvious to the common understanding at the time of its adoption”? Of the diverse interpre*566tations that are said to he available to us may we (No, Brothers, should wef) select the one “which will defeat rather than effect the constitutional purpose”? And — should we adopt the legalistic construction defendants urge upon us — , what is left to the people excepting the hollow and helpless shell of a completely disemboweled constitutional limitation? If a “foot-in-the-door” additional tax — on purchases and sales at retail — of 1 cent is good, why can’t it be 10 cents at the next term of the legislature?
As Mr. Justice Smith has persuasively demonstrated, questions such as these speak clear answer in favor of supremacy of the Constitution over this 6-weeks-old act of 1959. Doubtless our Brothers would agree with us on that score, could they agree that the simple questions themselves are proper. But, in effect, say they (and here comes the real point of our total disagreement), “the questions are not ■ right; our teaching, our legal philosophy, our settled convictions, lead us to examine the Constitution by other and more technical modes of test, just as we have done in the past, and we listen more to the voice of the legislature than to the voice of the people as we confront a case like this.” In opposition we in effect reply: “But our teaching, our legal philosophy, our settled convictions, lead us to examine the Constitution by other precepts for we hear only the voice of the people in determining the construction and applicability of its terms.”
If this opinion does no more than to reveal fully and for all to see the actual ground and cause for today’s division, it will have served its purpose. Through the quodlihets of Mr. Justice Carr the veteran members of this Court have explained their past and present philosophic and legal reasons for approaching decision of this case. The value of their presentation and ours will have to be appraised over the years by society as well as by the profession. *567So far as we are concerned there need only be recorded here what surely seems to be, by all respectable authority extant (starting with Chief Justice Marshall’s quoted declarations and extending' through the great works of Story and Cooley to the solid front of uniform judicial agreement), the right way to undertake solution of a constitutional problem as at bar. Here, then, not in our words but in those of the great writers and scholars of constitutional law, are the plain reasons why we choose to ascertain the people’s meaning of their Constitution before we undertake any consideration whatever of the legislation in question.
Mr. Justice Story:
“Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings. The people make them, the people adopt them, the people must be supposed to read them, with the help of common sense, and cannot be presumed to admit in them any recondite meaning or any extraordinary gloss.” (1 Story, Constitution [5th ed], § 451, p 345.)
Mr. Justice Cooley:
“Constitutions do not change with the varying tides of public opinion and desire; the will of the people therein recorded is the same inflexible law until changed by their own deliberative action; and it cannot be permissible to the courts that in order to aid evasions and circumventions, they shall subject these instruments, which in the main only undertake to lay down broad general principles, to a literal and technical construction, as if they were great public enemies standing in the way of progress, and the *568duty of every good citizen was to get around their provisions whenever practicable, and give them a damaging thrust whenever convenient. They must construe them as the people did in their adoption, if the means of arriving at that construction are within their power. In these cases we thought we could arrive at it from the public history of the times.” (People, ex rel. Bay City, v. State Treasurer, 23 Mich 499, 506.)
“And in seeking for its real meaning [Const 1850] we must take into consideration the times and circumstances under which the State Constitution was formed — the general spirit of the times and the prevailing sentiments among the people. Every Constitution has a history of its own which is likely to be more or less peculiar ; and unless interpreted in the light of this history, is liable to be made to express purposes which were never within the minds of the people in agreeing to it. This the Court must keep in mind when called upon to interpret it; for their duty is to enforce the law which the people have made, and not some other law which the words of the Constitution may possibly be made to express.” (People v. Harding, 53 Mich 481, 485.)
Mr. Justice Campbell (Mr. Justice Cooley concurring) :
“The cardinal rule of construction, concerning language, is to apply to it that meaning which it would naturally convey to the popular mind, in all cases where the propriety of such construction is not negatived by some settled rule of law. In all •instruments which are submitted for confirmation to the people themselves, and which derive all their validity from a popular vote, such a construction is peculiarly necessary; for otherwise they would be ! defrauded of the right to frame their own government according to their own will.” (People v. Dean, 14 Mich 406, 417, 418.)
*569Mr. Justice Cooley (quoted in May v. Topping, 65 W Va 656, 660 [64 SE 848]):
“A Constitution is made for the people and by the people. The interpretation that should be given it is that which reasonable minds, the great mass of the people themselves, would give it. ‘For as the Constitution does not derive its force from the convention which framed, but from the people who ratified it, the intent to be arrived at is that of the people, and it is not to be supposed that they have looked for any dark or abstruse meaning in the words employed, but rather that they have accepted them in the sense most obvious to the common understanding, and ratified the instrument in the belief that that was the sense designed to be conveyed.’ (Cooley’s Const Lim 81*).”
United States supreme court (modern declarations) :
“If we remember that ‘it is a Constitution we are expounding,’ we cannot rightly prefer, of the possible meanings of its words, that which will defeat rather than effectuate the constitutional purpose.” (United States v. Classic, 313 US 299, 316 [61 S Ct 1031, 85 Led 1368].)
“Ordinarily courts do not construe words used in the Constitution so as to give them a meaning more narrow than one which they had in the common parlance of the times in which the Constitution was written.” (United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Asso., 322 US 533, 539 [64 S Ct 1162, 88 L ed 1440].)
General text-statements:
“The question in interpreting a Constitution is not so much how it was understood by its framers *570as how it was understood by the people adopting it.” (11 Am Jur, Constitutional Law, § 84, p 707.)
“Words or terms used in a Constitution, being dependent on ratification by tbe people voting upon it, must be understood in tbe sense most obvious to tbe common understanding at tbe time of its adoption, altbougb a different rule might be applied in interpreting statutes and acts of the legislature. This gives rise to the universally recognized and incontrovertibly established rule of construction that it is presumed that words appearing in a Constitution have been used according to their plain, natural, and usual signification and import.” (11 Am Jur, Constitutional Law, § 65, pp 680, 681.)
We shall now proceed to demonstrate from our decided cases why some of our members undertake constitutional construction with the wrong rules. For illustration let us recall the sad history of judicial evisceration of another tax-limitational provision — the so-called 15-mill amendment.*
That amendment was, when it was adopted by the people, trustingly regarded as having limited to the constitutional rate of 1-1/2% the “total amount of taxes assessed against property in any one year.” Yet when the right of protection against “special” assessment was asserted under the amendment, our predecessors seized upon the technical distinction (just as they again do here between sales taxes and use taxes) between general taxes and special assessments (Graham v. City of Saginaw, 317 Mich 427). They then proceeded to tell the people that by their amendment they had succeeded only in protecting themselves from higher general taxes; that the amendment did not include “special” assessments within its protective scope, and that the respective legislative bodies of the State remained free to levy, *571without limit and without regard for the constitutional limitation, all kinds of “special” assessments. Thus was a big gouge torn from the intended muscle of the limitation, simply because the Court forgot or overlooked the guide of Marshall and Cooley.
Now it has always been clear to us that special assessments are “taxes” and that ordinary people by common understanding of their Constitution had an amendment which protected them from additional property taxation, no matter the brand name which any legislative act or judicial decision might stamp on the particular impost or levy against such property. (One’s home can be lost just as quickly and finally for nonpayment of “special” assessments as for nonpayment of “general” taxes.) By the same token, and if the defendants are right in the case before us, an ordinary citizen can be denied the right to purchase groceries or, say, a motor car, should he refuse to pay this 1959 imposed tax on that which he would purchase at retail.
Here, then, is the old game of cat with mouse the defendants would have us play with the people when similar constitutional limitations are before us. If the Constitution restrict the amount of “taxes” levied against property, we are presumably to tell the complaining taxpayer — “Ah, yes, but these are special assessments.” If the Constitution restrict the amount of taxes levied on purchases and sales at retail, we are to say — to the appealing taxpayer— ■“Sure, you are right, but these are use taxes” (and so on). Thus, by the doctrinaire notions of our Brothers, the people cannot prevail, no matter what they may write into their Constitution for the purpose of limiting the power of taxation, unless, possibly, they go about the task of writing and adopting a limitational provision in the fine print form — with at least as many words — of an insurance policy. This is something Marshall tells us does not belong *572in a Constitution. So does our common sense. And there is no need or occasion for it, Marshall’s searching analysis considered.
What then is our essential difference of opinion in this case?
Our minority still stands, despite Bacon’s recent about-face on construction of constitutional tax limitations, just as it did before. From the pre-Bacon record of the past, such limitations seem to have been looked upon by them “as great public enemies standing in the way of progress.” Indeed our Brothers still appear to regard it the “duty of every good citizen” to give such limitations “a damaging-thrust whenever convenient.”*
Our majority, on the other hand, stands for a people’s construction of such limitations, a construction which perforce is of greater breadth by the might of popularly understood intention at the time of adoption.
Our view stands for the people’s understanding of tax limitations that are created by the people. The other view stands for the legislators’ and lawyers’ interpretation of a tax limitation created by the people. This is where we part.
And so our good Brothers would in effect say to the legislature: You may with our blessing levy any tax on the transaction of retail sales, in any amount, s*o long as you call it by some other name than a sales tax and are careful not to levy it by amendment of the sales tax law. Thus may you get around the Constitution. We say to the legislature, on the other hand: Your membership like our own should always inquire (before enacting or approving tax legislation scrutinized under a constitutional tax limitation) what the people by popular understanding *573had a right, from the beginning, to expect from the limitation.
In these portentous days of October we are not just deciding this case of Lockwood. We are declaring again, in the same language and according to the identical convictions of 88 years ago, a great principle of constitutional law for the guidance of legislators, governors, judges and lawyers. The people’s intent is supreme. When the constitutionality of legislation is challenged here the Constitution is our first line of inquiry. And we obtain the answer when we look to the laws and the usages, and to the popular knowledge thereof as of the time of adoption of the provision in question. Here the popular conception of retail sales taxation, theretofore created by law and painfully ingrained into the people’s comprehension by the retail practices of the years leading to adoption of this amendment, must lead “all reasonable minds” to the inevitable conclusion that the legislature has erred in the present instance.

The Question of Legislative Motive

Defendants rely in their brief to great extent on the established rule that constitutionally questioned legislation comes into court armed with a conclusive presumption of “proper motive” on the part of the legislature. Here again there is no disagreement. We may and do look upon the legislature as consisting of 144 dedicated apostles of the people intent always on ascertaining and carrying out the people’s will (in spite of that which appears in the legislative journals) *.
*574Sure, all members of the legislature are honorable men. But all that is quite irrelevant to the present problem. The legislature, good intent and all, has made a mistake. We may concede it was an honest one. Doubtless it was partly encouraged to enact the legislation in question by faith and reliance on past decisions of this Court in similar cases, an abrupt halt of which was called in Bacon. Such reasoning is fully consistent with that which defendants’ counsel themselves point out (by quotation from People v. Gibbs, 186 Mich 127, 135 [Ann Cas 1917B, 830]):
“Bad motives might inspire a law which appeared on its face and proved valid and beneficial, while a bad and invalid law might be, and sometimes is, passed with good intent and the best of motives.”
Upon these premises we may attribute to the legislature the loftiest motives and yet find that it should have pursued one or more of its earlier proposed resolutions to obtain from the people the desired relief; that it should not in lieu thereof have enacted a bill which, if given effect, would amount to a constructive fraud on the right of the people *575to decide these grave issues for themselves. Thus the present enactment — conceived as it was of desperation and frustration, chaos and crisis, temper and distemper — was passed while a sort of legislative delirium was running its course. This was “hydraulic pressure” with a vengeance.
We would pursue this point of good motive further. The legislature may have assumed that this Court would continue its inhospitable attitude toward constitutional limitations of tax rates, evidenced by its treatment of the 15-mill amendment during the past 15 years. The Court visibly and admittedly has looked with jaundiced eye on efforts of the people to restrict taxation by constitutional means. So this case is not one for suggestion of “bad motive” on the part of the legislature. Rather, it is one for recognition of that which has been the post-1933 policy of the judicial branch (until the halt was called in Bacon); for advising the legislature that the present Court turned in Bacon from the disproved doctrines Mr. Justice Carr has again written, and that a majority of this Court will, in the future, continue adherence to the rules of constitutional interpretation which this Court followed for more than 60 years, beginning in Cooley’s time. We seek not to change constitutional interpretation but only to return to the hallowed and time-tested doctrine of our great predecessors.

Conclusion

Even an appellate court judge, living as he must in a measure of social detachment, must on occasion get down to the earthy level where groceries and other necessaries of mortal sustenance are sold and bought at retail, for even judges must eat. Lined, up with his fellow purchasers at the checkout station, Mr. Justice gets the same look — from the point-*576of view of people generally — of that which is taking place all over Michigan as millions of retail sales of “tangible personal property” are contracted, com clnded and taxed under the asserted aegis of a combination of laws authorizing sales and use taxation. What is that look, from the actual point of view of the queue of buyers as each proceeds in procession to ante up? (Does not the carefully budgeting wife figure in the 4% tax before she goes to the store? Is it not simply that she pays an actual levy of 4% on the transaction of bargain and sale?) The sum of agreed prices of each purchased item is totted up and the checkout operator thereupon presses the “TX” button, which adds an actual tax of 4% to the sum of the buyer’s retail purchase. Ho pays the exacted tax — not 2 separate taxes by fact or common understanding — and gets his receipt showing the aforesaid total plus the machine-calculated tax of 4%. He has — all artful legal syllogism aside • — paid what to him and his fellows is no less than a levied sales tax of 4%, a tax which in part has been levied by unconstitutional legislation.
No member of this Court is unaware of the temporary yet dismaying consequences that are due to attend a determination that Act No 263 is invalid, even in part. The prospect is no rosier here than on the legislative and executive floors below. Yet we have no alternative when the people have spoken, clearly and forcefully, by their basic instrument of government by law. The remedy, even though it be slower, lies in another forum; that of submission to and decision by the people themselves. They wrote this proviso into the Constitution. Ours is not to rewrite it, or to interpret its intended purpose in such way as will leave it a puppet of the legislature.
If a judge could have his own way, if his personal predilections might lawfully be brought into play *577when the judicial process works upon a limitation as at bar, we doubt not that each of ns would prefer to pay more in the way of sales taxation than to assume another and presumably more progressively burdensome mode of taxation. But decisions of such nature, the Constitution considered, are not to be made by judges as judges. They are to be made by the casting of our ballots — as citizens — on general election day. And so we say judges have no right to cast ballots, the effect of which is judicial defeat of a properly adopted constitutional amendment, by means of an opinion or opinions deposited in our clerk’s office.
This illusion that from our cloistered heights we are unable to perceive what every citizen knows from his daily experience, namely, that he now is paying— by purpose and administration of this enactment— a tax of 4% instead of 3% on the necessities of life, is still another example of that which Mr. Justice Voelker has recently dubbed “judicial somnambulism.”
By the quoted constitutional proviso the people enjoined the legislature, firmly, this way:
You may proceed to levy sales taxes or sin taxes, use taxes or abuse taxes, privilege taxes or personal taxes, special assessments or general assessments, duties, imposts and excises. But you shall not levy, directly or indirectly, taxes on the transaction of retail sales at a rate or sum of rates greater than 3%.
The Supreme Court, too, advises and consents. We advise the legislature in this instance that it has transgressed and that we consent to the enactment of challenged legislation only when it passes muster under the Constitution.
We agree that the writ should issue.
Voelker, J., concurred with Black, J.

 “Provided, That at no time shall the legislature levy a sales tax of more than %%.” (Const 1908, art 10, § 23, as amended in 1954.)

 The people-intended design of the .1939 amendment was that of removing the judiciary (of the courts of reeord of Michigan) from partisan politics. Yet the legislature has been slow — mighty slow for 2 decades now — to effectuate such purpose so far as concerns nominations for the office of Supreme Court justice (See Const 1908, art 7, § 23, as amended).

 Bacon v. Keni-Ottawa Authority (October, 1958), 354 Mich 159.

 Our elders fail to perceive that the Constitution must not be interpreted by the ordinary rules and tests we apply to the words of a doubtful statute, a commercial transaction, an ambiguous will, a complex agreement of corporate structure, or a corner notary’s draft of deed or land contract.

 “A Constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by, which they may be carried into execution, would partake of a prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would probably never be understood by the public. Its' nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients' which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. * * * In considering this question, then, we-must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding.”' (M’Culloch v. Maryland, 17 US 316, 407 [4 L ed 576].)

 Page reference is to volume 1, 6th ed. See 1 Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations (8th ed), p 143.

 Eor such history, seo the outline with citations appearing in Sacón, supra, commencing on page 164 of report.

 The quotations are taken from Justice Cooley’s opinion in People, ex rel. Bay City, v. State Treasurer, followed in Bacon, both supra.

 The legislature was not exactly unaware of the well-understood restrictive nature of the limitational proviso, conjoined as it is with other known restrictions contained in the Í954 amendment of section 23. February 5, 1959 house joint resolution “Ii” was introduced by Representative Warner and others. Such resolution pro*574posed that a redraft of section 23 be submitted. Its thrust was that of obtaining, from the people, direct authority to levy, upon “all persons engaged in the business of making sales at retail, in addition to all other taxes authorized by law, an annual tax for the privilege of engaging in sueh business equal to 1% of the gross proceeds thereof.” February 27, 1959 senate joint resolution “H” was introduced by Senators Niehols, Andrews, Geerlings, Beadle, Minnema, Francis, Graebner, Younger and Lodge. This resolution proposed that section 10 (of article 10) be amended by the people in sueh way as to authorize borrowing by the State of a sum not to exceed $100,-000,000 and, relevantly here, to authorize the legislature to “levy a sales tax of 1% in addition to and upon the same base as the sales tax authorized by section 23 of this article 10, which additional tax shall expire not later than June 30, 1961.” Finally, by house joint resolution “Y”, introduced May 14, 1959, it was proposed by Representative O’Brien and another that said section 23 be submitted to the people for outright repeal. No one of these resolutions was adopted, and so the people have not been permitted to decide what some members of the legislature wanted — properly—the people to decide.