As a candidate for governor, former wrestler Jesse Ventura pledged to support the right of initiative and referendum in Minnesota. |
IN 24 STATES, not including Minnesota, Americans enjoy the ultimate power of self-government: They can vote to adopt or repeal laws at the ballot box. As a candidate for governor last year, Jesse Ventura assured Minnesotans that while they may have missed out on the first century of initiative and referendum — the first state to adopt them was South Dakota in 1898 — they would be on board for the next one.
"Initiative and referendum give people the right to bring things before the general population that the Legislature cannot or will not," Ventura said. "Government is supposed to be for the people, by the people. The powers of initiative and referendum directly support that proposition."
But now that Ventura has traded in his gold lamé wrestling shorts for a politician's pinstripe suit, he's decided he doesn't think so highly of the people's judgment after all.
"While it would be refreshing to give the absolute will of the people a chance to be heard on specific issues," he wrote this month in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, "it often results in too many laws being proposed and too much confusion for voters on Election Day. Perhaps more importantly, well-financed special interests can circumvent the legislative process to push an agenda."
Wrong on all counts. Ballots are not flooded with initiatives in the states that allow them, voters have no trouble passing judgment on complicated measures, and big-money interest groups that manage to get their pet bills on the ballot are routinely shot down on Election Day.
The arguments against letting the voters occasionally decide an issue directly are not new, and they haven't improved with age. What most of them have in common is the belief that ordinary voters are dumber than ordinary legislators. Voters won't consider the merits of ballot measures, the critics say. They'll be easily swayed by slick ad campaigns. They won't take the state's best interests into account. They are liable to pass foolish laws or repeal sensible ones.
There is a comical paradox to such arguments. If voters are too foolish to be trusted with initiatives and referendums, how can they be wise enough to vote for legislators? Conversely, if legislators are such paragons of wisdom and insight, why do voters — in poll after poll, state after state — express frustration at the refusal of lawmakers to deal with issues they care about most?
Activists typically resort to the initiative process when they have exhausted every other means of getting a grievance redressed. When the Legislature refuses to act, when the courts are no help, when the governor can't be bothered, when the newspapers give them short shrift, when paid lobbyists block them at every turn, ballot activists have one last hope: the people. And the people, time and again, come through.
Ballot initiatives have been deployed to give women the right to vote, to mandate an eight-hour workday, to abolish poll taxes, to cut onerous taxes. Initiatives and referendums — I&R, in political argot — have been used to ban steel traps in hunting, to legalize medical marijuana, to limit politicians' terms in office, to overhaul campaign finance laws, to end racial preferences, to abolish rent control, to repeal blue laws, and to mandate English instruction in the schools. Some of these are liberal reforms, some are conservative; none is trivial. And most went on the ballot because elected legislators preferred to do nothing.
I&R is constantly under attack. In Nebraska, the Legislature's bosses want to change the rules so that ballot measures would have to be approved in two elections before taking effect. In California, a bill in the state Senate would require all initiative signature-gatherers to publicize — right on the petition — the names of their major financial contributors.
In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that any stray mark on a petition — a doodle, a coffee stain, an underline — invalidates every signature on the page. In Colorado, the high court has been obsessively killing initiatives on the grounds that they run afoul of a rule requiring ballot measures to deal with only a single subject. In Oregon, opponents of direct democracy want to increase sharply the number of signatures required to qualify an initiative for the ballot. In Alaska, a proposed change would require signatures from 30 of the state's 40 legislative districts before a measure could go to the voters — a huge hurdle in a state as vast as Alaska.
It isn't only legislators who recoil from I&R. Business interests fight it, too. They reckon that it's easier to buy a few hundred state reps than a few hundred thousand voters. Clearly it is easier to promote a bad bill in a closed-door huddle at the statehouse than to defend the same bill openly in a public campaign.
Laws voted on at the ballot box tend to be more carefully vetted, more thoroughly debated, and more widely understood than those gaveled through on pro-forma voice votes in the capitol. Jesse Ventura frets that allowing voters to consider a few ballot measures every other year would lead to "too many laws being proposed" — yet in a typical two-year session, the Minnesota Legislature disposes of 6,000 pieces of legislation. The worst laws are always the ones passed out of sight, behind the voters' backs. Candidate Ventura, who ran on a platform of "Bringing Power Back to the People," understood that. Who'd have guessed that Governor Ventura would sell out so quickly?
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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