If, per impossible, anyone harbored any lingering doubt that the left in Colorado wants to get rid of our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) in its entirety, lock, stock, and barrel, those doubts surely have now been laid to rest. Earlier this week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, 5-2, that a blanket question – should the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights be repealed – did not violate the single-subject rule, and therefore some version of that question could be put on a ballot.

The ruling was in response to a motion filed by one of the state’s leading leftist policy organizations, the Colorado Fiscal Institute, which has been chomping at the bit to remove any legal restraints on government or its ability to appropriate your money to fund all manner of schemes, at least until your money runs out.

What has kept such a question off the ballot, besides good sense and lingering fealty to the Commandment prohibiting the coveting of thy neighbor’s goods, was the constitutional single-subject requirement, which directs that any ballot question put to the voters encompass a single matter. The noble idea is to prevent voters from doing (or undoing) things they have no inkling they are doing (or undoing) when they finally get around to filling out their ballots.

If that’s the case, the reasoning of the majority in the Colorado Supreme Court is a little dubious. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights buttons up around a lot of issues – the requirement that any tax increase be approved by the people; the provision limiting government growth; the mechanism for refunding taxes collected over that cap; the rule determining what sorts of ballot questions can be offered on odd-numbered years, etc. Using the court’s logic, a ballot question repealing the Colorado Constitution could pass muster, or perhaps one undoing the 2019 legislative session. After all, we’re talking about Just One Thing, right?

Yes, that is a bit of reductio ad absurdum, but it was not so long ago that a blanket repeal of TABOR was considered absurd. Like what Daniel Patrick Moynihan was referencing when he Christened the term “defining deviancy down,” absurdity is a moving target.

Anyway, now that the left can technically put the question of a full-blown TABOR repeal to the people, will they? Liberals hate TABOR the way water hates a dyke, and for the same reasons; but they are up against some pretty substantial obstacles.

The primary one is democratic. It turns out that people like being asked permission before they let the government abscond with more of their money. TABOR polls exceptionally well, even more so once its various parts and purposes are explained. The anti-TABOR zealots will need to justify not only why they think most people in the state are wrong on principle, but why they don’t trust the popular will on this one particular issue of taxation.

It will be an awkward position for a movement and a party (presuming the Democratic Party will be led by their more extreme elements to support the repeal) that fanatically advocates expansion of the franchise, to include even children, felons, and the imprisoned, to campaign on the denial of it when it comes to the question of taxation. Now I am certainly no fan of excessive direct democracy, for reasons historical, philosophical, and practical; but the entire concept and tradition of self-government delegates certain decisions to local plebiscitary sanction, and none can be more basic than a) who shall represent us? and b) how much of our property shall they be granted in so doing? The details can then be left to the realm of elected representatives.

The other mountain the anti-TABOR crowd will have to negotiate is the simple fact that it works; TABOR may frustrate those who wish to make free with the public purse, but that is exactly its purpose – to impose discipline on a legislative body for whom the political pressures to spend on this or that project far exceed those more general ones whose more distant warnings are easier to ignore. The result has been a state in far greater financial health than others which have maxed out the public credit card. It has also fostered an economy resilient enough to better weather whatever bad decisions the government may make within its limits.

The far left in Colorado has just been granted the leeway to ask the state’s taxpayers to surrender their rights. Put another way, the court has offered them plenty of rope to hang themselves.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.