Court Opinion

ID: 9622034
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:11:16.342571+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:12.433392
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Chief Justice,
concurring:
I concur generally in today’s pronouncement that the petition under consideration qualifies for submission to a vote of the electorate. By my concurrence today I do not intend to be understood as receding from my continued and unswerving commitment to Threadgill v. Cross.1 Threadgill teaches that the conformity of a measure’s content to constitutional norms may not be the subject of a judicial examination in advance of the initiative petition’s adoption. Preadoption constitutional challenges may address only vitiating infirmities in the initiative process itself as the sanctioned people’s conduit for pressing legal changes.2 The electorate’s effort at legislating should neither be scrutinized nor delayed by attacks that do not affect the petition’s compliance with some sine qua non submission requirement. I welcome and salute the court’s effort to restrict today the scope of constitutional challenges which may be entertained before the initiative petition goes to the electorate.
I
THE “PRUDENTIAL RULE”
The time-honored prudential rule is offended whenever a court allows challenges to the constitutional validity of legislation before it becomes law. The prudential rule of necessity, adhered to today by all state and federal courts, holds that constitutional issues must not be resolved in advance of strict necessity.3 No necessity exists for our presubmission resolution of content-based challenges to a measure which do not impair the initiative petition’s legal fitness for a vote by the people. In presub-mission stages (a) we cannot be sure that *1038when the petition is submitted for a vote the electorate will adopt the measure as law and (b) there is not then a lively controversy in which antagonistic adversaries press for testing a legal norm’s validity against the backdrop of facts unfolded when the measure was applied as law. Where there is no forensic scenario in the context of which challenged law is to be enforced, courts will not assess the attacked norm’s constitutional soundness in vacuo.4 Any departure from, these 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.5
II
THE PEOPLE’S INITIATIVE PROCESS SHOULD NEITHER BE DELAYED NOR BURDENED BY JUDICIAL INQUIRY INTO THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF A PROPOSED MEASURE IF THE INITIATIVE PETITION COMPLIES WITH THE SINE QUA NON REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
Constitutional judicature that takes place in the absence of a lively controversy hobbles and retards the initiative process in this court, causing undue delay in clearing the petition for a vote by the people. This court’s initiative jurisprudence should be most expeditious to provide due deference to the people’s fundamental-law opportunity for the exercise of power to propose law, constitutional and statutory.6
The delay caused in this court by an overextended constitutional inquiry in pre-submission stages of the process violates the statutory scheme designed to vitalize the initiative and referendum provisions of our fundamental law.7 The legislature’s intent in enacting these provisions was to implement the constitutional power of the people to make law or change their constitution.8 When this court superimposes its own procedural hurdles in the path of that regime, it needlessly delays the electorate in its pursuit of the valued right to legislate directly. The time lag between a point of protest to an initiative petition and the petition’s submission to the people should be reduced as much as possible by permitting only those challenges to be advanced in this court which, if sustained, would make the initiative process fatally defective as the law’s vehicle for people-proposed changes in the law and hence would operate to bar the petition’s submission.
Ill
RESTRICTIONS ON THE PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO LEGISLATE
A
THE THRESHOLD TEST FOR SUBMISSION
An initiative or referendum petition may be declared ineligible for a vote by the people only when it is fraught with a fatal impediment to its submission. It cannot be withheld from a vote for infirmities which, even if upheld, would prevent the *1039measure from passing constitutional muster, in whole or in part, as enforceable law after its adoption by the people. The initiative petition need only pass a threshold test to qualify for submission. It must (a) be in substantial compliance with the sine qua non procedural requirements for submission, (b) address but a single subject9 and (c) embrace content appropriate for lawmaking by the people.10 Once the threshold submission test is met, the measure’s potential infirmities as enforceable law must await judicial scrutiny until the adopted measure's content can be applied in the context of a lively postadoption adversary contest.
B
THREE CATEGORIES OF PERMISSIBLE CHALLENGES
Challenges to an initiative or referendum petition may be divided into three classes. Two of these may be advanced before submission,11 the third is available only in postadoption stages.12
I. A Challenge To The Petition For Noncompliance With A Sine Qua Non Procedural Requirement For Submission.
In Community Gas and Service Company v. Walbaum13 the court invalidated an initiative petition which failed to contain a required warning that signing the petition twice would constitute a felony. The warning clause was held to be a sine qua non requirement to the petition’s validity.14
I would allow any presubmission challenge based on a petition’s failure to conform to some mandatory or sine qua non constitutional or statutory procedural norms — as distinguished from a content-based challenge to the measure itself — if the procedural infirmities are apparent on the face of the petition. The people are without a constitutional claim to pass legislation in a manner that falls short of compliance with the minimum standards of prescribed procedure.

2. A Content-based Challenge To The Petition For Noncompliance With A Sine Qua Non Requirement For Submission.

In re Supreme Court Adjudication of Initiative Petitions in Norman, Oklahoma [Norman],15 the court considered two initiative measures for city-law changes16 — a proposed ordinance and a city charter revision. The court held that the proposed ordinance could not be submitted to a vote because the subject matter of the measure was found to lie outside the people’s range of power to legislate. Because the charter of Norman — i.e., the city’s own constitution — prohibits any legislation on the proposed subject, the authori*1040ty to make law on that very subject is to be viewed as withheld from the people’s direct power to legislate. On the other hand, a proposed change in the city charter was held to be within the scope of the municipal electorate’s initiative power.
If a matter stands withheld from legislative reach by the State’s fundamental law or by a city charter, neither the lawmaking body nor the people can legislate on that subject. Subjects upon which the legislature itself cannot enact laws are equally unavailable for the peoples’ lawmaking by initiative process. I would hence allow a challenge to be advanced in presubmission stages if, under the provisions of the city charter or of the state constitution, the proposed measure to be voted upon is claimed to deal with a subject on which the people may not make law. That kind of presubmission attack does not call for judicial examination of the measure’s content for constitutional conformity but rather assails the measure as entirely dehors the scope reserved for the people’s direct lawmaking authority.
In Norman the court used overbroad and unguarded language which appeared to signal its total departure from Thread-gill 's teachings. In my view, it was there unnecessary to overrule Threadgill. The court needed only to say that its teaching of presubmission forebearance was inapplicable to the challenge pressed in Norman. I would today confine Norman to its proper scope and give continued vitality to Threadgill’s general message of restraint.
3. A Content-based Challenge To The Petition, Which Is Unrelated To Any Sine Qua Non Requirement For Submission And Attacks The Measure’s Application As Invalid Law In Posta-doption Stages
In Threadgill we declined to entertain an attack launched on the constitutional validity of a measure proposed for adoption by the initiative petition. We recognized there that preadoption judicial testing ofproposed measures would invade the legislative prerogative “to determine what laws shall be passed, leaving it to the other departments to question or determine the validity of such laws only when they come to be enforced against some one whose rights they affect.”17 Threadgill teaches that a measure’s conformity to constitutional norms is not subject to judicial examination in advance of the petition’s adoption as law.
The people of this state may rightfully demand an election on any measure they propose which might prove constitutionally objectionable in some postadoption application. The legislature itself would be equally free to pass laws that may, when enforced, turn out to be constitutionally infirm. This court does not “pluck” bills moving through the legislative process for a microscopic review of their constitutional orthodoxy. Neither should the judiciary be allowed to arrest people-initiated measures by probing into their potential conformity to the constitution’s norm after they become enforceable as law. The people qua lawmakers must be placed as nearly as possible in the very same legal position as that occupied by the legislature. Both lawmaking processes merit an equal measure of freedom to shape and promulgate laws unimpaired by the judicial department’s gauge of fundamental-law compliance.
SUMMARY
Once an initiative petition passes muster under the threshold test for submission to a vote of the people no constitutional attacks addressed to the measure’s content as enforceable law may be judicially entertained. All other attacks must await the measure’s adoption and its application in the context of a lively postadoption controversy between antagonistic adversaries with legal standing to press challenges. My concurrence today is not to be mistaken for abandonment of my commitment to Threadgill’s teachings insofar as they require that when an initiative petition has satisfied the threshold submission test it stands immune from constitutional attack *1041launched on its content in advance of adoption.

. 26 Okl. 403, 109 P. 558 [1910],

. My commitment to Threadgill, supra note 1, is reported in several prior decisions. See In re Initiative Petition No. 349 [No. 76,437, February 20, 1991] (Opala, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); 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, Etc., Okl., 648 P.2d 1207, 1220, 1222 [1982] (Opala, J., concurring in the judgment); In re Initiative Petition No. 315, Etc., Okl., 649 P.2d 545, 554-555 [1982] (Opala, J., concurring in result).

. Smith v. Westinghouse Elec. Corp., Okl., 732 P.2d 466, 467 n. 3 [1987]; I.N.S. v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 937, 103 S.Ct. 2764, 2776, 77 L.Ed.2d 317 [1983]; Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 347, 56 S.Ct. 466, 483, 80 L.Ed. 688 [1936] (Brandeis, J., concurring); see also Schwartz v. Diehl, Okl., 568 P.2d 280, 283 [1977]; Dablemont v. State, Department of Public Safety, Okl., 543 P.2d 563, 564-565 [1975].

. Smith v. Westinghouse Elec. Corp., supra note 3.

. Art. 5, §§ 1-8, Okl.Const. In Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Smith, Okl., 610 P.2d 794, 807 [1980], we stated that Art. 5, §§ 1, 2 and 7, 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 _” Our teaching in Smith applies with equal force to interference by the judicial department.

. Direct legislation means legislation by the people. Representative legislation means legislation through the elected representatives (legislators).

. 34 O.S.1981 §§ 1 et seq. See also In re Initiative Petition No. 281, State Question No. 441, Okl., 434 P.2d 941, 952 [1967],

. The pertinent provisions of Art. 5, § 3, Okl. Const., are:
“ * * * Petitions and orders for the initiative and for the referendum shall be filed with the Secretary of State and addressed to the Governor of the state, who shall submit the same to the people. The Legislature shall make suitable provisions for carrying into effect the provisions of this article." (Emphasis added.)

. In re Initiative Petition No. 344, Okl., 797 P.2d 326, 330 (1990); In re Initiative Petition No. 342, Okl., 797 P.2d 331, 333 (1990).

. In re Supreme Court Adjudication of Initiative Petitions in Norman, Oklahoma, Okl., 534 P.2d 3 [1975].

. The two classes of permissible presubmission challenges are dealt with in Community Gas and Service Company v. Walbaum, Okl., 404 P.2d 1014 (1965), and In re Supreme Court Adjudication of Initiative Petitions in Norman, Oklahoma, supra note 10 at 8; see also text in Part 111(B)(1) and (2), infra. See in this connection Gordon and Magleby, Pre-Election Judicial Review of Initiatives and Referendums, 64 Notre Dame L.R. 298, 302 (1989); Grossman, The Initiative and Referendum Process: The Michigan Experience, 28 Wayne L.Rev. 77, 111 (1981); Note, The Judiciary and Popular Democracy: Should Courts Review Ballot Measures Prior to Elections?, 53 Fordham L.Rev. 919 (1985).

. See Threadgill, supra note 1, and text in Part III(B)(3), infra; see in this connection Gordon and Magleby, supra note 11 at 304; Grossman, supra note 11 at 111; Note, supra note 11 at 922.

. Supra note 11 at 1016.

. The court has followed Walbaum, supra note 11, on several occasions. See, e.g., Morehead v. Dyer, Okl., 518 P.2d 1105, 1107 (1974); Matter of Initiative Petition, Okl., 718 P.2d 1353, 1354 (1986); In re Initiative Petition No. 344, supra note 9 at 330; cf. In re Initiative Petition No. 342, supra note 9 at 333.

. Supra note 10.

. In a city legal system, the city’s constitution is called the charter and its statutes are known as ordinances.

. Threadgill, supra note 1 at 563.