California, from what I've heard, has a major issue because it doesn't effectively have a constitution or an effective legislative structure that can stand abov

California, from what I've heard, has a major issue because it doesn't effectively have a constitution or an effective legislative structure that can stand above the People's mood at the moment: Unlike other jurisdictions, California's history has been shaped by simple-majority citizen-initiated constitutional amendment referendums, with a low threshold for getting on the ballot and precedence over any statutes passed by the legislature. These are so common and easy to sell that judges have been required to interpret the people's will when they pass conflicting referendums - and this was happening often enough that their Supreme Court felt the need to create a vote plurality standard to decide which to follow. Conventional constitutional democracy has supermajority elements; California is one example of what might happen if they were all simple-majority and you treated the constitution as the frequently-rewritten book of laws, and the only people who could practically write this type of law given a divided legislature, were citizens.