If you are like me (Ed: not very likely…) you look forward every week to the Colorado Politics section entitled Out West Roundup (we are in the west after all) featuring a few quick hits on news items from around our region.

This week’s edition has several fascinating stories, and I recommend you go read them now before continuing to peruse my current rant…

All caught up? Good!

As is usually the case, I found a couple of stories that made me feel good about what is going on, and a couple that troubled me. I think I actually heard everyone’s eye-roll when reading the story about the chap from back east who had to be rescued twice in two days while hiking the Arizona mountains. Turns out, if you intend to hike mountains in the winter, you should probably bring a proper coat, but I digress…

The story I want to focus on today is not, to my own surprise and likely that of some of my readers, the story about Idaho’s legislature sending a Texas-style anti-abortion bill to their governor’s desk. This bill would ban any abortions after six weeks (which, as we all know, is long before many women even know they are pregnant) and would allow family members and select others to sue an abortion provider up to four years later for twice the Texas limit, a full $20,000. Oh, and while the law prevents a rapist from suing, it allows the relatives of the rapist to sue on, I guess, the rapist’s behalf. Horrible legislation and yet one more step toward the inevitable (and shameful) overturning of Roe v. Wade. But I’m not going to talk about that today.

Instead, please consider with me the story about what the New Mexico Supreme Court had to do recently. On March 7, that Court ruled that citizens cannot convene a grand jury to investigate (and then overturn) their governor’s actions regarding COVID.

I’ve written before on the COVID foolishness we are continuing to see in our society. In spite of just under a million Americans dead from the pandemic, there are still those who insist on their right to be, well, stupid, and who deny either that the virus is real, or that the shots work, or some other anti-science point of view. Oh, and freedom, of course. Freedom to be reckless in a manner that actually puts others’ lives at risk.

But I’m not going to talk about that either (Ed: will you *please* get to the point?).

Instead, I want to ponder the other aspect of this story that may have escaped your initial attention. In New Mexico, citizens can circulate a petition and if they get enough signatures, a grand jury is empaneled to investigate the issue of concern. Some anti-science folks in New Mexico, we learn from the CP roundup, tried to create a grand jury to “investigate” the governor’s orders during the crisis about things such as masks and in-person teaching in schools. Multiple lawsuits were filed, and they all lost, leaving the Governor’s powers intact. The grand jury path was a last-ditch effort, and it too failed.

But what is amazing to me is the very concept that regular citizens can, merely through the collections of signatures, force the formation of an actual grand jury to investigate nearly anything. There are only six states that allow this process (the aforementioned New Mexico, as well as Kansas, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada and Oklahoma).

Back in 1995, some citizens in Oklahoma forced a grand jury to investigate the Oklahoma City bombing, asserting that the conspiracy went well beyond Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. The grand jury was created and investigated and found, you guessed it, nothing more that those two monsters.

My main point here (Ed: finally!) is that I’m glad Colorado doesn’t have the same laws as New Mexico. It is, frankly, a terrible idea to allow regular folks, with nothing more than a strong feeling that something should be investigated, to force the creation of a grand jury. Get enough signatures (which, if you have the time and money isn’t too hard to do) and you could, say, force the formation of a grand jury to investigate that odd neighbor of yours, or your local school board, or wherever your flights of fancy suggest.

As with the OK City case, absent a strong legal foundation, these grand juries are not likely to find much that actual professional investigators already did, but they are costly in two ways. First, the money – tax dollars – that an already overburdened court system must spend, and second, the damage such a panel can do to innocent people. Even the negative attention in the press created by a person being “investigated by a grand jury” might be enough to destroy a person’s business or livelihood, regardless of innocence or guilt.

The Founders knew what they were doing when they created a republic and not a direct democracy. They wanted a buffer between the momentary passions of the outraged and the actual wheels of governance. A direct democracy might work in, say the classic New England town meeting, where a small community can vote on where stop signs should go. But decisions about whom the judicial system will haul into court should be decisions made by, well, the judicial system.

Yet another reason to be happy that we live in Colorado, but watch your back if you move to New Mexico, and make sure you don’t tick off your neighbors.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.