The Majoritarian Difficulty

Neither house of Iowa’s legislature has the slightest interest in a constitutional amendment overriding the state Supreme Court’s perfectly plausible holding that denying same-sex couples marriage rights violates the state’s constitutional admonition that “the general assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.” Why, it’s almost enough to make me wonder in what sense the Court’s decision was a “usurpation” of the will of Iowa’s current legislators in the first place.

Meanwhile, the massive backlash is also evident in Vermont. I mean, the Vermont House could only barely scrape up a 2/3rds majority to override the governor’s veto! I hereby arbitrarily declare that to be really democratic they would need at least 90% of the vote in both legislatures and a referendum.