This General Assembly is drawing to a close; today is reportedly the final day of this session. The online version of the Indianapolis Star reported yesterday on end of the session negotiating in a story that concluded with this:
Meanwhile, House Democrats continued to raise topics that had not cleared either chamber, including a provision to allow Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to buy and renovate a hotel and conference center.Some of you may be interested in reading my 29-page 2001 law journal article, "Enforcing Indiana's Constitutional Requirement that Laws be Limited to One Subject," available here.) Some quotes:Senate GOP lawmakers raised concerns about the number of topics House Democrats appear willing to combine in the same bill. The state Constitution limits bills to one subject.
"There may be so many subject matters we're inviting the courts to come in and settle it," Garton said. "And I welcome it."
A law containing more than one subject would appear to be prohibited by the Indiana Constitution. But the last time the Supreme Court of Indiana used the one subject matter limitation to invalidate a law was thirty years ago, in 1971. Although a number of legislative acts have been challenged on the same basis since 1971, including those described above in the Indianapolis Star editorial, none has been held by the Court to violate the one subject matter prohibition.Has anything changed in the past few years? Perhaps. See this Indiana Law Blog entry from June 26, 2003, on the 6/24/03 Indiana Supreme Court decision in Cittadine v. INDOT. Posted by Marcia Oddi at March 4, 2004 07:39 AMThe direction the Court has taken in recent years is one of reluctance to intervene in the activities of a co-equal branch of government. But is judicial deference the proper response? This paper attempts to answer that question by first examining the genesis of the current constitutional requirement. Although the one subject limitation contained in Article 4, section 19 has been a part of the Indiana Constitution since 1851, there have been three different versions of Article 4, section 19 during that period. Interpretations of Article 4, section 19 by the Indiana Supreme Court led to two constitutional amendments to that provision in the twentieth century, in 1960 and in 1974.
Next, this paper examines the Court’s decisions interpreting the 1851 and 1960 versions of the one subject matter limitation. These versions required that an act shall contain but one subject, “which shall be expressed in its title.” The “title-body” test the Court applied in many of its holdings involved a parsing of the title of the act to determine whether it was broad enough to encompass all the provisions of the act itself.
Third, this paper examines the Court’s decisions since 1974. Although the requirement that the subject of the act be expressed in its title no longer exists in the current version of Article 4, section 19, this paper finds that initially the post-1974 Court holdings continued to rely on the title-body reasoning of earlier decisions. More recently, the Court has adopted the position that the one subject matter limitation is one that the General Assembly itself must police.
Finally, this paper looks at the ramifications of the current Court’s “hands-off” position, concluding that this position of judicial deference to a co-equal branch of government may unfavorably impact both the executive branch and the judiciary itself.