Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

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initiative, referendum, and recall Second Amendment rights

Two-Way Communication

Tonight Americans have an opportunity to listen to President Barack Obama as he directly states his case for a U.S. military attack on Syria. Wouldn’t it be nice if, for one day, instead of Americans listening to the president, the president had to listen to us?

Not just on Syria . . . on anything.

Well, Eureka!

The polls will be open in Colorado all day before the Big O’s big oration, from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm Rocky Mountain Time, enabling voters to do the talking in the first recall elections of state legislators in Colorado history.

This is no mere politician monologue, but a real democratic dialogue. And you can bet politicians will be listening — from state legislators to the gun-controller-in-chief.

The conversation started this past legislative session, when Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) and Senator Angela Giron (D-Pueblo) moved two laws through the Colorado Legislature. Anti-gun laws. This angered Second Amendment activists. The conversation continued when a group of citizens decided they weren’t willing to suffer silently; they drew up recall petitions and then gathered tens of thousands of voter signatures, triggering the recalls.

That’s a lot of hoops to jump through. The president can simply call up the networks and almost instantly communicate to millions. But citizens have to work harder for their talk time.

So, listen respectfully to the president tonight, by all means . . . but remember that, if you want politicians to listen, the initiative, referendum and recall constitute one heckuva megaphone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Another Trout in the Milk

Maine’s small farmers had held out great hope for LD 1282, explained the Bangor Daily News a few months ago. The bill, if made law, would have allowed “unlicensed farmers whose facilities are not under inspection to sell up to 20 gallons of raw milk per day directly to consumers, so long as the product was clearly labeled.”

For small farmers, a traditional freedom, a niche in the system.

For big farmers it presented an unwelcome double standard, allowing something for the little guy that the big guy couldn’t match. And yes, the bill did suffer from this kind of inconsistency, but only because current regulations all stack against small farmers.

The bill passed, but last month the governor vetoed it . . . and the veto was not overridden. No legal raw milk in Maine.

For some in the state’s Republican Party, including national committee member Mark Wilson, that was just too much. “We want our God-given rights to buy, sell and consume what we want protected by the law — not restricted by FDA or USDA directives.” Citing lack of principle on the federal level, too, they resigned from the party, choosing to focus on helping their “fellow Mainers outside of party politics.”

The story hit the papers.

Can they accomplish more good outside the GOP? Probably. The state’s initiative and referendum process rated a C in Citizens in Charge’s 2010 report; most states rate an F. But there’s no point in even trying to rate partisan politics. It’s that bad.

And direct citizen action is certainly less frustrating. It’s hard when you must fight not only the opposition party, but your own team as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Division and Democracy

Recalls of elected officials are said to be “divisive.” And, I guess, to an extent they are. The elected official being recalled seems to take it personally.

At times, democracy can be messy and unpleasant, since we don’t all agree on everything, including whether the guy or gal the majority of us reluctantly agreed to in the last election deserves to finish out his or her term of office. Across America, where citizens have access to the process, elected officials are recalled pretty infrequently, though more often recently than in yesteryears.

Politicians with power are more often running amok, so no wonder citizens exercise this democratic check “more often.” What’s the alternative?

Some would say wait until the next election. But sometimes waiting years for the next election is potentially too damaging or dangerous. This is even more so where democracy is more fragile, say in Egypt.

In this most populous Arab nation, street protests against the elected government were followed by a military coup d’état, tanks thundering down Main Street, the arrest of the president and other government officials, violent street battles and shootings of unarmed citizens protesting the government’s removal.

As official Washington decides whether or not to call it a coup — in effect, whether to fund those who carried out the overthrow —  it dawned on me that a democratic process whereby elected leaders can be peacefully removed — i.e., recall — is a whole lot better and safer than street protests and military coups.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary U.S. Constitution

No Right to Defend Your Rights

You have no right as a voter to defend your interests as a voter. Not in federal court.

So decides the Supreme Court in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a case about a controversial California ballot question. The court ruled 5-4 that petitioners “lack standing.” Their interest wasn’t “particularized” enough.

Passed in 2008, Proposition 8 amends the California constitution to stipulate that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Two questions must be distinguished. One, whether Proposition 8 is consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The high court could have agreed with the lower one that it isn’t. Two, whether voters – in this particular case, the official state recognized proponents of the measure – may judicially defend a law brought to ballot by themselves and duly enacted, when state officials decline to defend that law.

I’m no fan of Prop 8. But for the land’s highest court to rule that voters and petitioners have no “standing” here is a horrid precedent. It tells government officials to take heart if they dislike a law that voters have passed. Maybe not enforce or defend it at all, say — and regardless of any constitutional finding. After all, what can We the People do? It’s not as if we have standing!

Justice Kennedy, in dissent, pinpoints the default: “the Court fails to grasp or accept . . . the basic premise of the initiative process . . .  The essence of democracy is that the right to make law rests in the people and flows to the government, not the other way around.”

Oh, yes, the people do have standing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall Second Amendment rights

A Voter Revolt

The signatures are in: 16,199 of them — twice as many as needed to initiate the first recall election of a state lawmaker in Colorado history.

The target of voter ire? Senate President John Morse. He ticked off his El Paso County constituents by spearheading the recent triple whammy of gun control legislation that neatly bypassed Colorado voters earlier this year.

You may remember the controversy. The three bills in question, signed by the governor as emergency legislation so that no voter referendum was possible, elicited widespread negative reactions in the state, including nearly every county sheriff in Colorado publicly opposing the bills.

So, why did the sheriffs oppose the legislation, while Democrats in the legislature passed the bills?

Like state legislators, sheriffs are elected. But, unlike legislators, sheriffs deal with self-defending citizens qua citizens, as well as criminals and victims, on a regular basis. Such experience brings a different perspective, and makes sheriffs more skeptical of blunt legislative solutions.

Traditionally, Democrats — despite the fondness demonstrated by their party constituencies for increased government control over private weapons — tend to treat the issue of “gun control” with some modicum of care. At least, those in the mid-west and western states tend to.

But Senator Morse did not.

Morse won the senate seat back in 2010 by fewer than 350 votes, with a Libertarian Party candidate racking up 1,320 votes — almost 5 percent. Libertarians are strongly pro-Second Amendment. Yet, Morse treated his narrow victory as a call for sweeping change. A mandate!

He may reap the “reward” for such “courage.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Arkansans, Call Your Lawyers

Seeing how the IRS flagrantly violates the civil rights of Americans, do we really need more government agents, more bureaucracies to ride herd over our political endeavors?

Arkansas’s Senate Bill 821, an unconstitutional slap at citizens who dare propose ballot measures, was passed despite my many, many, many complaints, and is being implemented as Act 1413.

The law mandates that every paid petitioner read the Secretary of State’s booklet explaining the state’s initiative process. But the booklet didn’t even exist . . . until now.

It explains: “The Secretary of State’s Office has attempted to incorporate the changes made by Act 1413 into the procedures that follow. However, since the changes in the law were extensive, it may be helpful to review Act 1413 of 2013.”

How nice of the Secretary of State not to use the term “extreme” and to go, instead, with “extensive.” Call it Arkansan generosity.

One of Act 1413’s more draconian provisions throws out an entire page of voters’ signatures on a petition if one signature is a voter from a different county.

“Determining whether a Petitioner has signed the correct petition is not always obvious. Many cities cross county boundaries,” the booklet sympathizes, noting that such honest mistakes happen “frequently with voters whose homes are near a county border.”

And will now be used against you.

The main thing the booklet advises? Hire a lawyer:

“If the reader has questions concerning Act 1413 of 2013 . . . the reader should contact his or her own attorney for a legal opinion as to specific facts.”

Should only citizens with their “own” attorney be able to participate?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Rocky Mountain Facts

Norma Anderson is one of the politician-plaintiffs challenging Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights in federal court. The former Republican state senator claims the citizen-enacted measure, requiring a vote of the people to raise taxes, is unconstitutional. Why? It violates the legislature’s divine right to raise taxes without having to bother to obtain voter approval.

“We should eliminate the initiative to change the constitution,” she wrote in the bimonthly magazine of the Colorado Municipal League, “but continue the process for the statutes.”

Then, only the legislature would have the power to propose amendments — or, I should say, not propose amendments — like term limits or tax-and-spending limits.

Plus, legislators can repeal any statutory initiative they don’t like. That happened with campaign finance reform.

Anderson complains that Colorado’s “constitution has been amended repeatedly by initiative” and that all those amendments “have made it the wordiest and longest in the nation.”

True?

No. Colorado doesn’t have the longest state constitution. Or the second longest. Or third or fourth or the fifth longest. Colorado’s ranks seventh in word count.

Moreover, the campaign finance measure noted above accounts for nearly 10 percent of the constitution’s verbiage.

Besides, most of the amendments to Colorado’s constitution have come from legislators, not through citizen-initiated petitions. Since voter initiatives began, roughly two-thirds, 63 percent, have come from the legislature.

Forget the facts, though, Anderson and her fellow politicians have had enough of popular government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

The Natural State of Politicians

Republicans took over both chambers of the Arkansas Legislature, last November, and now have control for the first time since Reconstruction — that’s the century before the century before this century.

Not long after their installation ceremony, the Republican majority — apparently eager to make new reforms — introduced Senate Bill 821, creating a new state program to regulate people circulating initiative petitions. Arkansas activists, the Advance Arkansas Institute and Citizens in Charge were effective in getting legislators to dramatically pare back and remove several harmful and unconstitutional provisions of SB 821, but the legislation designed “to make the referendum process prohibitively difficult in Arkansas,” still passed.

Even more underhanded was passage of House Joint Resolution 1009, “The Arkansas Elected Officials Ethics, Transparency and Financial Reform Act of 2014.” It’s a doozy:

  • With claims of preventing legislators from giving themselves a pay raise, the measure actually removes the current constitutional requirement that voters approve any pay increase and creates a commission of citizens (appointed by legislators and other politicians) to give those same politicians a pay raise.
  • While claiming to enact a gift ban and other ethics reforms, the measure actually provides, Arkansas Times’ Max Brantley wrote, “constitutional protection extended to special interest banquets and travel junkets for legislators.”
  • Completely unannounced by the title, the measure also changes the state’s term limits by allowing legislators to hang around for 16 years in the House or the Senate.

Still, I look on the bright side. The people of Arkansas, having meet their new boss, will petition and vote and sue to protect their rights.

Plus, yesterday, the legislature adjourned. It’s safe again in Arkansas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Railroading Vancouver

Vancouver, Washington, Mayor Tim Leavitt enthusiastically supports a bridge project that would carry light rail trains from Portland, Oregon, into his town. “There is no more important opportunity for our city and our region than completion of the Columbia River Crossing,” he intones.

Transportation activist Margaret Tweet is more cautious. “Precious little discussion is held on the true transportation needs of our region by the government agencies that propose costly solutions,” she writes.

Back in 1995, Clark County — which includes the city of Vancouver — held a vote on a measure to fund the extension of Portland’s light rail to Vancouver. It was defeated. As if fearing repetition of this, today’s city “leaders” chose not to risk a similar negative vote. According to them, they alone should decide this expensive, controversial public works project.

So a group of citizens led by Larry Patella filed an initiative petition to gain a vote to forbid the city from spending any money to facilitate the Columbia River Crossing project. But their petition fell 32 signatures short of qualifying.

Then it was discovered that 606 people had signed the petition more than once. By state law, the county threw all the duplicates out.

So, seventy-five plaintiffs, including 44 folks who mistakenly signed the petition twice, sued to have their signatures count . . . just once. And last week a judge overturned the rule on duplicate signatures.

Is the initiative a go? Maybe not. Vancouver City Attorney Ted Gathe has issued a legal opinion saying the citizen-initiated ordinance is outside the power and scope of the initiative process. The city council seems poised to use the attorney’s opinion as an excuse to again block a vote of the people they serve.

Allegedly serve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Know Your Rights

Last year, Angela McCaskill, the Chief Diversity Officer at Gallaudet University, was placed on leave from her job for simply signing a petition.

That was a violation of her rights, plain and simple.

Well, someone in Wisconsin just lost his job for signing a petition. But there is a difference.

On Tuesday, Circuit Judge Tom Wolfgram in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, was defeated by a better than 20 point margin in his bid for re-election. Never before had Wolfgram, a three-term, eighteen-year incumbent, even faced opposition.

But then he signed the petition to recall Governor Scott Walker.

The petition successfully triggered a recall election, but proved unsuccessful in removing Gov. Walker.

But because petition signatories are a matter of public record, Wisconsinites (and the known universe) discovered that Judge Wolfgram had signed that petition to put a recall of the governor on the ballot.

The petition, or at least Wolfgram’s signature on it, triggered Wolfgram’s opponent, attorney Joe Voiland, to launch a campaign for the judicial post by attacking Wolfgram for lack of impartiality . . . for signing the Walker Recall.

Some argue that those calling to put a measure on the ballot must do so fully under the public lens. Others fear retribution to signers, equating the signing of a petition with the casting of a vote.

I fall into the latter camp. While opponents must have the access necessary to make any reasonable challenge to the validity of the signatures, that can be accomplished without allowing full public disclosure of all the personal data of those who have signed.

However, as in this case, once the public has the information, repercussions at the ballot box can hardly be prevented.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.