Quote:
Originally Posted by ASU2003
If congress passes it (or is it 2/3rds of the states), the President signs in, and the supreme court approves it, then anything can become constitutional nation-wide. But, the voters trump the legislative, unless the voters approved something that is prohibited in the constitution.
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You're all mixed up here. The critical piece you've missed is that there is NO SUCH THING as a FEDERAL referendum in the US. Referenda (or "ballot issues" or "initiatives" or "legislative referrals") are available to certain STATES because they're provided for in the constitution of THAT STATE. The states have various mechanisms by which the government (in some cases, state legislatures, in others, the governor) can decide to run some decision as a public referendum item. It's not like the public vote "trumps the legislative". It's more like "the elected officials passed the decision-making buck to people even less qualified to make the decision".
And any legislative action of any STATE (including legislative action delegated to public vote) is still beholden to all federal law, including most centrally the federal Constitution.
So there's no provision for polling the entire nation for federal legislative issues. And polling the public of a state for legislative matters is showing itself to be a pretty iffy matter too, between ratifying Prop 8, and California's Proposition 13, where voters decided to bankrupt their own state because they didn't want to pay taxes.