My colleague Matt Beienburg and I have an article in National Review Online this morning about the Arizona Proposition 208 case, and how ballot-box taxation is coming to your town soon. Excerpt:
Prop. 208 sought to exempt the measure from these limits — not by amending the constitution, but by simply declaring that Prop. 208 was not subject to this constitutional rule. That didn’t go over well with the state supreme court, which ruled in August that an ordinary law cannot simply lay aside the constitutional rules. To the extent that the initiative mandated spending above what the state’s highest law allows, the justices declared, it was unconstitutional. They then sent the case back for trial to determine exactly how much Prop. 208’s spending mandate will exceed the legal limit.
That’s a welcome result, but it’s hardly the end of the story. The Prop. 208 saga — along with the $200 billion bonanza unions scored from federal COVID packages — make clear union leaders’ intentions to keep ratcheting up the costs, rather than the quality, of America’s K–12 schools. Arizona’s experience suggests that progressive activists will continue to frighten voters with false claims about school funding and, if necessary, disregard even existing constitutional limitations on their power in the quest to do so.
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