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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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July 30, 2003

"If appropriate" author joins lawsuit

Former state legislator Barry Keene, the author of the infamous words “if appropriate” in Article II of the constitution, has researched his records and refreshed his memory of the 1974 amendment he sponsored that added those words while striking hundreds of others from the recall provision. When I first spoke to him a week ago, Keene said he did not remember why he put the words in there. Now he does. He says they were intended to ensure that the lieutenant governor would become governor in the case of a recall. He said he meant to ensure that Article V, which provides for the succession, applied to all vacancies in the governor's office, and that a recall would create a vacancy, to be filled not by the voters but by the constitutional elevation of the lieutenant governor.

Keene says he is joining a petition to be filed today in the Supreme Court on this matter, “in order to make it clear that the intent of the succession provisions in Article V was to prevail against any and all other law or legislation that might be passed to the contrary, such as a recall-plus election.” He adds: “The words ‘if appropriate’ are quite significant, very significant. They apply not only to judges but charter municipalities and other kinds of situations, to protect those situations from being steamrolled by the recall language in Article II.”

If accepted by the Supreme Court, Keene’s take would cancel the second half of the recall ballot, which is an election to replace the governor if he is recalled in the first half of the election. I am skeptical. Keene was a careful legislator who was not known to sneak things past people. I find it very hard to believe that he would put a constitutional amendment before the people of California taking away their right to elect a governor to replace one being recalled and not bother mentioning it to anyone. The issue doesn’t appear anywhere in Keene’s argument for the constitutional revision he sponsored in 1974, or in the analysis in the ballot pamphlet prepared by the legislative analyst’s office. It is my understanding that those documents, and not the memory of the author, is where the courts normally look to guide them on interpreting the meaning of a ballot measure.