Paradox of Self-Amendment by Peter Suber Maloney contends that, in any event, no present amendment of the New Mexican constitution could endanger New Mexico's status as a state. The statehood issue clearly overwhelmed the self-disentrenchment issue, as well it might under New Mexico's unique circumstances: no other state was required by Congress to change its AC, or even to vote on changes, as a precondition of admission, even though many other states used the same two-thirds supermajority for ratification of state amendments.[Note 13] In Arizona where the required changes were quickly repealed, the changes had not been self-amendments nor the repeals self-disentrenchments. Later in the same year Maloney finally reached the self-disentrenchment question when he repeated his earlier ruling that AC §1 had not been amended by implication. This time he based his reasoning on the impermissibility of any amendment of AC §1 except by convention. Attorney General Opinion No. 69-151 (1969). The underlying issue was still not dead, however, and in 1970 Maloney faced a new dimension of the problem: if the earlier opinions agreed that constitutional amendments could not be proposed in even-numbered years, then what is to be done about the eight that were proposed in 1970? Maloney did not directly say that a court could nullify them if ratified, or enjoin their further consideration, or suggest that he would use his prosecutorial discretion toward these ends. Instead he personally doubted that a court "would" nullify them if ratified, if only because the people would have expressed their will and the courts indulge every presumption in favor of the validity of amendments that the people have ratified. Maloney was evidently trying to say, without abdicating his role as the highest law enforcement officer in the state, that acceptance can cure defects in the most fundamental procedures. In Hart's terms, acceptance can validate laws that, through some defect, are not validated by the rule of recognition. Maloney concludes in a most humble mood, saying that while two different Attorneys General have found that constitutional amendments cannot be proposed in even-numbered years, relying upon different interpretations of the constitution, nevertheless they had not exhausted the reasonable interpretations and a court might disagree with them both. While standing by his opinion, he will not deny that a contrary reading of the constitution could be made to appear reasonable, although he can give no hint how. Attorney General Opinion No. 70-81 (1970). In New Mexico, in sum, a rule that was incompletely entrenched against all amendment except by convention was impliedly amended without a convention, according to one Attorney General. From another angle the same phenomenon may be described as the disregard of a limitation on the amending power in the form of an act of self-amendment. The AC (in §1) did not disentrench itself, or repeal the limitation on its power, except impliedly and pro tanto; it merely "violated" that limitation and got away with it. Moreover, an Attorney General in an advisory opinion held that the limitation may be repealed without any special procedures, even though he held in a prior opinion that it could not be violated by an ordinary amendment. The incomplete, irreflexive entrenchment clause is not impliedly self-entrenched and may be repealed without resort to the special procedure it names. Such repeal would constitute genuine self-disentrenchment, but of a less objectionable sort: repeal of an unentrenched entrenchment clause rather than a self-entrenched entrenchment clause. This implied self-amendment and self-disentrenchment have not been struck down by the courts and have been upheld by the Attorney General — one ruling that the self-amendment actually occurred, another ruling that the self-disentrenchment actually could. Another entrenchment clause in the New Mexican AC has not been so fortunate. Within AC §1 itself a clause incompletely entrenches two sections in Article 7 (on voting) and two sections in Article 12 (on education). While ordinary sections may be amended by a simple majority of the electors, these four sections may only be amended by a three-fourths supermajority with the added requirement that there be at least a two-thirds supermajority in each county. The latter requirement makes the New Mexican counties into entities much like the states in the federal Senate; they are represented in these special amendment referenda as units, not by population. For that reason the two-thirds requirement was struck down by the New Mexican Supreme Court for violating the one-person, one-vote principle of the Fourteenth Amendment. State v. State Canvassing Board, 78 N.M. 682, 437 P.2d 143 (1968).[Note 14] It is probably significant that the court struck down the two-thirds requirement after 11 attempts had failed to amend one of the entrenched sections. The three-fourths supermajority requirement was not challenged and still stands. Both the three- fourths and two-thirds requirements were added to AC §1 in the vote demanded by Congress, and were drafted by Congress. The court gave no hint that entrenchment, or at least the incomplete entrenchment before it, was impermissible in itself. One may doubt whether the particular entrenchment clause before the court would have been found to violate the Equal Protection clause if it had not already blocked 11 attempts to amend one section. The normal rule across the country is that the one-person, one-vote principle does not apply to elections that ratify state (or federal) constitutional amendments. See Jackman v. Bodine, 78 N.J. Super. 414, 188 A.2d 642 (1963). To the extent that the history of blocked attempts at amendment influenced the court, the rule of law was covertly bent to accommodate the perceived will of the people, which in Hart's jurisprudence is not only justified, but valid law if subsequently accepted by the people and officials. The two Attorneys General disagreed in their interpretations of the constitution, but the effect was that one allowed self-amendment in violation of an entrenchment clause, and the other allowed self-disentrenchment of that entrenchment clause. The inference model cannot tolerate either act; but even if it could somehow tolerate self-amendment, it must still balk at self-disentrenchment. If an AC is completely and concentrically self- entrenched, the hardest case (and one that did not arise in New Mexico), and if self-amendment is otherwise permissible, then for self-amendment to be possible in this case the self-entrenching language must be (1) repealed before self-amendment, or (2) repealed simultaneously with the self- amendment of the entrenched AC, or (3) simply violated with impunity. The third is obviously impossible for the inference model. The first is also impossible, for the inference model, because it would require an act of self-amendment to repeal the entrenching language, and therefore could not take place without acting before it acted. 62