Last week, the Supreme Court of California removed a voter-qualified initiative from the November ballot. The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act (TPA) would have required that tax increases be approved by a simple majority of voters while maintaining the current requirement that they also be approved by 2/3 of the state legislature. The measure also would have required a 2/3 vote to raise local taxes (changed from the current simple majority rule), and that ballot proposals involving tax increases must explicitly state that on their title.

In removing the initiative from the November ballot, the court ruled that “the changes proposed by the [initiative] are within the electorate’s prerogative to enact, but because those changes would substantially alter our basic plan of government, the proposal cannot be enacted by initiative.” The initiative had been challenged last year in an emergency petition from California governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature. The last time the state Supreme Court removed a ballot initiative was in 1999.

The TPA has been compared to California’s Proposition 13, which was approved in 1978, and which since that time has limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value (at the time of property sale), with future increases of no more than 2% per year. Proposition 13 was placed on the ballot through the initiative process as a constitutional amendment. So why was Proposition 13 approved through the initiative process while the TPA was not?

An amendment is a focused and specific change to the state constitution, which in the case of Proposition 13, applied to the process of setting property taxes. A constitutional amendment may be placed on the ballot if a minimum of 8% of the number who voted in the previous........

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