By WILL MCCARTHY and EMILY SCHULTHEIS : politico – excerpt

TAKE IT TO COURT — The California Supreme Court may have just invited upcoming ballot-measure combatants to put aside television and direct-mail budgets and invest even more in lawyers.

A decision last week to remove the Taxpayer Protection Act from the November ballot represents just the second time in a quarter-century that the court has quashed a measure before seeing if it won voter approval. Constitutional lawyers say the ruling’s enduring legacy will likely be a flood of lawsuits aimed at determining whether the court has set a new standard for culling measures, or simply redefined a longstanding line in the sand.

“That’s too soon to tell,” said Kurt Oneto, a lawyer specializing in statewide ballot measures. “But if you are opposed to a measure and you can beat it in court, it’s a heck of a lot easier than beating it at the ballot box.”…

A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures getting our attention this week.

1. PROP 47 OVERHAUL: Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislators have all but abandoned the prospect of negotiating the tough-on-crime initiative off the ballot by Thursday’s deadline, instead discussing the possibility of putting forward a competing initiative on the ballot themselves. Either way, crime and retail theft will be a driving issue in the lead-up to November.

2. PERSONAL FINANCE: Negotiations around a new high-school graduation requirement are coming down to the wire. But proponents of the initiative say they “continue to be optimistic,” and Assemblymember Kevin McCarty’s bill, which appears to be the best vehicle for a deal, has been sent to the Senate Committee on Appropriations ahead of Thursday’s deadline to pull qualified items from the ballot.

3. RENT CONTROL: The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is launching a new digital ad campaign that picks up on a theme typically popular among conservatives: the population exodus from high-cost California. The $600,000 buy, which will run for eight weeks on Facebook and Instagram, makes the case for rent control as a solution, in line with the group’s ballot initiative.

4. ACA 1: The California Association of Realtors agreed to take a neutral position in exchange for some tweaks to the constitutional amendment that are slated to pass the Legislature today. The realtors had been expected to be among the biggest foes of the proposal to lower the voter threshold for local public housing bonds.

5. OIL WELLS: Environmental opponents of a referendum to overturn restrictions on oil wells announced a new $1 million ad campaign last week in a last-ditch show of strength aimed at getting the oil industry to pull its measure. The ad, featuring Jane Fonda and other women involved in the campaign, will run until the ballot deadline.

6. CHILDREN’S HEALTH CARE EXPANSION: Just days after officially qualifying their initiative for the ballot, children’s hospitals could be close to a deal with the Legislature to pull it in exchange for passing trailer bill SB 159, which would provide more state money to such facilities.

7. TAXPAYER PROTECTION ACT: The California Business Roundtable built a formidable coalition to pass an anti-tax constitutional amendment. Now that it’s been booted from the ballot, leader Rob Lapsley says the group will redirect its energies toward other measures — meaning the Roundtable will still be a player on a pair of tax-related constitutional amendments still headed to the ballot…(more)