Michael Gilbert emails:

I have some thoughts on your suggestion that states should simply eliminate the single subject rule.
Yes, judges can manipulate the single subject rule to achieve whatever substantive outcomes they desire. But I don’t think that’s cause for eliminating it. The rule serves important purposes, especially in the initiative context. The problem is that those purposes–preventing logrolling, preventing riders, maximizing transparency–are explicitly political, but judges don’t treat them that way. Judges view the rule through the lens of legal logic. If an initiative embraces a single, logical subject, they presume that the aforementioned political problems are not present. But that’s simply not true. As you said in your post, logrolling and riding can take place within an initiative that embraces one logical subject–e.g., a combination of environmental measures. And logrolling and riding may be entirely absent from an initiative that is deemed to embrace multiple logical subjects–e.g., the CO case.
If courts want to get this rule right, they have to move away from their nebulous, logical tests and think explicitly in political terms. I understand there’s hesitancy over this. Courts in this country are comfortable examining the substance of laws but not the political processes that gave rise to them. But that’s exactly what the rule requires them to do. And there are ways to do it that would both limit judicial discretion and help the rule to achieve its purposes more effectively. I’m working on a paper (with Bob Cooter) that examines the purposes of the rule in the initiative context and develops a new judicial test for compliance. I’m attaching (with some hesitation, as it’s still in draft form) a link to the paper if you or anyone else is interested.
http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&context=alea