Purposes of chapter
The people enact this chapter to accomplish the following purposes:
(a)
Appropriations for the support of the Legislature should be reduced by thirty percent from 1983–84 budgeted levels and future growth in legislative spending should be limited to a rate commensurate with the growth of state government spending in general.
(b)
Control over legislative spending should be removed from the hands of powerful individual lawmakers and there should be established a system of independent monitoring of legislative spending practices and increased disclosure of legislative spending levels.
(c)
All Members of the Legislature, regardless of partisan affiliation, should be provided with equal opportunity and resources to effectively serve their constituents. The minority party or parties in each house of the Legislature should be provided with resources, funding, and a policy-making voice proportionate with their numbers in that house in order to achieve the end of fair and effective representation for all.
(d)
No single Member of the Legislature should be given extraordinary power to influence the course of legislation nor the power to punish other members for the good faith exercise of their free will and judgement on behalf of their constituents.
(e)
No system of legislative voting which serves to deny or obscure the people’s right to know how their representatives vote should be permitted in the Legislature.
(f)
The people have the right to have notice of, see, and express their feelings on all proposed changes in the laws, including those changes proposed in reports of conference committees, and any knowing and willful violation of these rights should be a criminal offense and the laws passed in violation thereof invalidated.