Working Amendments: Returning Power to the People

Colorado’s constitutional failures are not isolated; they occur in predictable structural areas where power has escaped its limits. To restore lawful government, we must advance working constitutional amendments that directly correct those failures. These structural issues are organized into practical “boxes” below — areas where authority must be returned to constitutional boundaries.

This box restores the Colorado Constitution as enforceable supreme law within the state. It eliminates authority based on precedent, convenience, or continuity and requires every branch of government—including the courts—to operate only within express constitutional grants of power.

This box prohibits the State from delegating essential government functions—such as elections, taxation, lawmaking, budgeting, law enforcement, or regulation of the practice of law—to private parties, political organizations, nonprofits, contractors, or professional associations. Sovereign power must be exercised only by constitutionally authorized public officers.

This box establishes that candidates are public candidates while campaigning and that voters have a right to equal, non-monetized access. Forums and debates may not be conditioned on payment, financial contribution, or preference of candidate, and fundraisers must be explicitly designated as such.

This box protects the free speech of electors in all forums—physical, papered, or digital—where public candidates or officials speak in their public capacity. Blocking, throttling, tiered speech, algorithmic suppression, or pay-to-be-heard practices are prohibited.

This box restrains judicial activism and procedural favoritism. It removes presumptions of constitutionality, bars courts from rewriting or “saving” unlawful acts, requires equal footing between the State and the People in court, and provides automatic consequences—voidness, injunction, and reassignment—when courts exceed their authority.

This box limits executive orders to internal administration and true emergencies. It prohibits governors from creating policy, reimagining systems, restructuring markets, or substituting executive judgment for legislation through decrees, task forces, or pilot programs.

This box restores the separation between government and private life. It prohibits the State from operating, recreating, or reimagining private business, housing markets, labor systems, education pipelines, or economic “talent systems,” whether directly or through public-private partnerships.

This box requires counties and municipalities to base housing, growth, and service plans on actual, existing infrastructure—especially water and sanitation. Paper planning without physical capacity is prohibited, and residents may not be forced to absorb the costs of unfunded or speculative growth.

This box restores parental rights as the primary authority over a child’s care, education, health, and upbringing. It affirms that parents—not the State—hold decision-making authority for their children, and that government may not interfere absent a specific finding of abuse or neglect established through due process. Parental authority may not be displaced by policy, ideology, administrative rule, or emergency declaration.

This box restores health as an absolute Fourth Amendment right to be secure in one’s person, papers, and effects. It defines personal and social health as private and voluntary, and limits public health strictly to clean water and sanitation—excluding medical mandates, surveillance, behavioral regulation, or emergency expansions.

This box prohibits the State from data mining, population profiling, artificial intelligence surveillance, or purchasing personal data. The government may not build dossiers on the people, whether directly or through third parties.