THE NATION'S PULSE: Mob Rule: The Beauty of Direct Democracy
Macomber, Shawn
THE NATION S PULSE SHAWN MACOMBER Mob Rule: The Beauty of Direct Democracy official animal of some county, it's pretty hard to rely on state legislatures to do much of anything," explains Ron...
...The initiative process unsurprisingly leads to some stupid or trite laws...
...The legislature just does so many embarrassing things out here," McLaughlin said...
...The 34-year-old Huntington Beach attorney, like so many others, is paying the price for political conviction: He's being taken for granted...
...Increasingly, citizens find it much easier to go around legislatures than through them...
...Opposing groups can sue and tie enforcement of the initiative up in the courts...
...Instead they may lose their jobs...
...The Boston Globe, which had run editorial after editorial panning the measure, noted glumly the day after the vote that the "prospect of saving on their tax bills clearly resonated with manyvoters...
...Having seen the power and willingness of people to affect change in states with initiatives, Waters explains, politicians from states without initiatives are not eager to allow them...
...The media and political establishment, who had fought so ferociously against the measure, were deeply troubled...
...Former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta dismissed California initiatives and recall measures as "democracy run amok...
...The expense and man hours necessary to petitioning for an initiative ensures that it will only be used when the legislature has failed to address a problem and has frustrated a significant portion of the electorate...
...Legislators often complain about the initiative system because they don't like the people making rules for themselves," Belgarde said...
...This is a matter of law, morality, and thousands of years of experience in what and what does not work in a healthy society...
...Despite that sort of gleeful legislative hyperactivity, on any remotely sensitive issue our elected representatives bow to the legislative tendencies of judges, only too happy to avoid taking a stand on anything of social consequence...
...If it wasn't for the initiative, it would be hard for me to have much faith in democracy...
...Thanks to the initiative process, 13 states now require a supermajorityvote of the legislature to raise taxes...
...Critics of direct democracy tend to cite James Madison's misgivings about the "tyranny of the majority" in the Federalist Papers as an intellectual argument against initiatives...
...Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote an entire book opposing initiatives, Democracy Derailed, calling them "the most uncontrolled and unexamined arena of power politics...
...It is there in black and white...
...Four states—Colorado, Arizona, Washington, and Oklahoma—require voter approval of any tax increases by the municipalities, county governments, or state legislature...
...There is a political price to pay for enforcing controversial initiatives, and so the temptation not to enforce a new regulation remains...
...As representative democracy becomes less responsive, initiatives have become increasingly popular...
...Tory columnist George Will complains of disasters caused by the people's "zeal for majority rule" and describes direct democracy as "precisely what America's Founders devised institutions to prevent...
...Fewer than half of all initiatives pass...
...No wonder the majority of special interest money spent influencing initiative votes is spent trying to secure "No" votes...
...He did not want to see every decision being made en masse...
...Translated from Newspeak, that reads, "Voters were smart enough to decide to vote for me, but clearly too stupid to vote for policy," which is demonstrably untrue...
...THE NATION S PULSE SHAWN MACOMBER Mob Rule: The Beauty of Direct Democracy official animal of some county, it's pretty hard to rely on state legislatures to do much of anything," explains Ron Unz, a California multi-millionaire software entrepreneur who has personally bankrolled initiatives against taxpayer financed bilingual education in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts...
...We seek merely to re-establish, or reclaim, rights that have been usurped...
...If approved, McLaughlin's initiative would require the government to provide schoolchildren in California with Bibles, presented "objectively as part of a secular program of education," to stay on the good side of the Supreme Court, of course...
...We'd just hand it all over to the judges and go home...
...Fed up, McLaughlin is preparing to take his case directly to the people via ballot initiative...
...More importantly, it shines a light on that failure whether the initiative passes or not...
...There is no shortage of politicians publicly opposed to into StIhNeCE HtIoSf a "safe" CALIFORNIA NEIGHBORHOOD settled afe Republican district, Matt McLaughlin has felt isolated from the political process...
...The initiative is, he said, a "victim of its own success...
...It's not like a legislator's vote on an omnibus bill filled with special interest-influenced pork entirely unrelated to the stated purpose of the bill...
...Would Madison deny the right of people to use initiative as a weapon against unresponsive government...
...Many critics decry the influence of big money on the initiative process, and it is true that direct democracy is not immune from the influence of cash or special interests...
...The Center for State Constitutional Studies reports that, from 1950 to 1974, states passed only 279 initiatives...
...When voters are unsure about a measure, they vote `No,'" Waters insists, and he's right...
...While this increase is noteworthy, it is important to keep in mind that initiatives have not reached any sort of primacy in the lawmaking game...
...Assemblymen and senators, so sure of the vote, don't even bother to answer his letters or return phone calls anymore...
...In many states, a sort of fourth branch of government has sprung up in the form of citizen initiatives, referenda, and other forms of direct representation...
...But what you see is what you get...
...It's happening to Democrats in solid A liberal districts as well, he said...
...With populist movements it is difficult to maintain organized pressure on those who seek to thwart the spirit of the initiative...
...But, like the American Revolution itself, the ideas we seek to infuse into the body politic are not themselves revolutionary...
...THE INITIATIVE PROCESS does not seek to replace representative democracy, and it couldn't if it tried...
...Arguments against initiatives usually revolve around a couple of points...
...In Multnomah County, Oregon, county officials began issuing marriage licenses to gays and lesbians in clear violation of the law...
...Despite the opposition of the press, teachers' unions, and the Latino lobby, the Unz bilingual initiatives have passed handily...
...This initiative is our way of focusing on something positive, of taking a stand against the social decay in our government...
...Twenty-four states currently allow citizens to draft their own laws or constitutional amendments, and then petition to have a direct vote on the legislation in a statewide ballot...
...The first is the supposed inability of the public to wrap its head around complicated policy issues...
...I believe in the Initiative and Referendum," Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1912, "which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative...
...The battle now is not to expand initiatives to Former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta dismissed California initiatives as "democracy run amok" MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47 THE NATION'S PULSE states that don't currently have them," M. Dane Waters, chairman of the Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, says...
...This issue is one that has implications far beyond who gets married...
...Nevertheless, today's barrier to Bigger Brother began as a tool of "progressivism...
...Yet now when a clear and immediate threat exists, the same legislators run for cover...
...Attorney Donald Kilmer, Jr...
...It's been a long time since we've seen that sort of support for initiatives from seasoned pols...
...Within days of the licenses being issued, Oregon Christian Coalition executive director John Belgarde and volunteers took to the streets collecting signatures for three prospective ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage and another three petitions to recall the county commissioners who broke the law...
...Ward Connerly found this out the hard way while struggling to get his anti-affirmative action initiative approved by Florida's courts...
...Polished pols speak in vagaries to keep the rabble guessing until the courts render their decision, then they throw up their hands in mock exasperation, loudly decry "judicial activism," and scurry back to the safety of their offices...
...Still, often as not, these populist revolts have far-reaching consequences even if every detail is not carried out to the letter...
...contends that the initiative he supports to amend the California constitution by adding "a personal right to keep and bear arms for defense of self, family, and home" is revolutionary only in the context of today's count-to-five jurisprudence...
...The fight now is to just hold our ground and keep initiatives safe in states that have them...
...Initiatives have significantly overhauled affirmative action, imposed term limits on elected officials, ended social services to illegal aliens, and abolished rent control...
...The furor over gay marriage is a perfect example...
...But while he did write about the necessity of representative government upholding the "cool and deliberate sense of the community," he also wrote that "an elective despotism was not the 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 government we fought for...
...Voter initiative laws were first sought by the Populist Party during the late 19th century...
...Jesse Ventura, for example, promised to bring referendum and initiative to Minnesota during his populist gubernatorial campaign, but once in office quickly reneged...
...Victorious Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney publicly opposed the measure, but made clear that he had taken the message that "people do not want to see taxes go up in Massachusetts" to heart, and, so far, they haven't...
...HE SHOCK politicians and media elite display toward T certain initiatives only serves as further proof of just how far removed from their constituencies they have become...
...The distaste for direct democracy is bipartisan...
...They probably thought they'd end up making grandiloquent statements about equality on Wolf Blitzer Reports, get some national exposure, and wait for the great robed masters to weigh in...
...Lower class farmers and miners who made up the party did not have much political clout, however, and it wasn't until urban upper middle class progressives took up the cause a couple of decades later that the initiative became a reality, buoyed by popular support for women's suffrage...
...In California you can eat as many cows as you like, but to slaughter a horse for food is a felony...
...This Amendment is a revolutionary act given the present status of firearm rights in California," Kilmer writes...
...By the time the language was right, there was no time left to collect signatures...
...It is true Madison was a proponent of representative government over direct democracy as a system of government...
...Once an initiative is approved, voters still have to rely on bureaucrats and legislators to carry it out...
...In the next 25 years, that number rose to 929...
...Worse, judges and legislators in states that have initiatives are making it harder to get them on the ballot with stricter rules for disqualifying signatures...
...14 Shawn Macomber is a reporter for The American Spectator...
...It seems unlikely...
...Who knows what the commissioners were expecting to happen...
...Outside of passing pork legislation or establishing the ferret as 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 SHAWN MACOMBER same sex unions, and yet many still refuse to support amendments to state constitutions outlawing the practice...
...But at least social conservatives have a fighting chance and an opportunity to register their opposition to decaying moral standards—a relief even avowedly conservative politicians seldom afford them with their eyes on swing votes...
...Conservative supporters of direct democracy say the criticism of initiatives merely as a form of radical-ism is very often off the mark...
...But this interpretation misses the context of Madison's argument...
...The average legislature passes 1,000 laws a year...
...For example, voters from the deep-blue state of Massachusetts nearly approved, with 45 percent of the vote, a measure eliminating the state's income tax in 2002...
...While it would be refreshing to give the absolute will of the people a chance to be heard on specific issues, it often results in too many laws being proposed and too much confusion for voters on Election Day," Ventura told the Wall Street Journal...
...For guys like Unz, the occasional dumb law is a small price to pay...
...In some states a single smudge or line can invalidate an entire sheet of petition signatures, and the language of an initiative must be crafted carefully and with regard to the state constitution or it could be blocked from ever making it to the ballot...
...An initiative isn't sneaky, or under the radar...
...If you wanted to use bad laws and stupid legislation as the standard, you could probably make a better case for abolishing state legislatures than initiatives," he says...
...Despite widespread public support for both a state and national initiative processes, Mississippi was the last state to amend its constitution to allow for such votes more than ten years ago...
...From gay marriage to taxes to partial birth abortion, the new political die has been cast...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
