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Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

Bear in mind that, without the 7/8 clause, it would be impossible to legislatively overturn or modify prop 22. It would have required a public referendum to do so. Now, it merely requires a legislative ultra-majority - improbable but more realistic than another public vote.

Also, please bear in mind that CA legislature has already exempted wide and arbitrary swathes of industry from AB5, seemingly based on each industry's political clout. While I wish for better worker protections than prop 22 provides, AB5 was bad legislature and implemented in a less-than-above-board way.

disclosure: I do work for a gig company, opinions are my own, etc. personally I want all the workers unionized, everywhere.

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> Now, it merely requires a legislative ultra-majority - improbable but more realistic than another public vote.

Public initiatives are far more easy to pass than legislative ultra majorities, which is why they are often used to bypass requirements for mere supermajorities in the legislature in CA.

It's true that the 7/8 out doesn't make it harder to pass change since it can still be overturned by vote of the people, but it doesn't make it meaningfully easier, either, since such an ultramajority is much harder to marshal than a simple popular majority.

AB5 passed with approximately 3/4 of the vote from both houses of the state legislature, so even a 3/4 threshold would have placed Prop 22 at immediate risk of being overturned by the legislature.

I don't think it's easier, exactly - if you can get 7/8 you could presumably pass a referendum. But it can certainly be faster (and cheaper), if you do have agreement.

You might as well call it impossible, as long as the CA legislature has more than 12.5% Republicans -- which is basically going to be forever. Requiring a referendum would be better.

A referendum to modify or repeal prop 22 is definitely possible! The 7/8 clause is an additional mechanism to alter the law, not the exclusive mechanism.

One would hope that a truly wise policy could attract bipartisan support. A faint hope these days, to be sure.

wow, it went from almost impossible to just improbable, everything is great then.

I'll be the first to admit that it's not great. There's a pretty wide area between "great" and "unacceptable", and I think that prop 22 is in there.

Regarding 7/8 specifically, it's true that it's "not great" and it's also true that it is "better than the default".

Consider the authors' perspectives for a moment, if only to understand it. One party has a supermajority in the CA legislature, and they are openly hostile to prop 22. They didn't necessarily want an immutable proposition, but they also didn't want it to be immediately nullified. 7/8 seems like a way to guarantee that changes can be made if and only if there's broad bipartisan support for those changes.

You don't have to agree with that perspective but I think it should be said that there's a non-nefarious way to see it.

It's just a strange way to conceptualize the process. The whole concept of a ballot proposition is to give voters the final say on policy questions - if legislators could easily overturn propositions, what would be the point?

I assumed the idea was to allow popular but divisive issues to be decided upon without attaching the name of specific legislators to the issue.

Both factors are relevant, but the final say thing is pretty characteristic of California. For bond measures, it's actually mandated by the state constitution - once the legislature passes a bill for a new bond program, they have to create a ballot proposition to ask voters for approval.

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