One of the things I do is promote the initiative and referendum process. Have you noticed? Well, that means traveling around the country and speaking before groups of people interested in making the world a freer, better place. Recently I spoke at “Liberty On the Rocks” in Denver:
Ari Armstrong asked some great questions — questions I think that would come to most thoughtful people’s minds, when contemplating direct action via the ballot.
Voters in Wichita, Kansas, went to the polls, Tuesday, to smash a measure that would have forked over $2.25 million in tax rebates to a downtown hotel project. Those supporting the giveaway spent $300,000 to promote the deal, while opponents ponied up a scant $30,000 against it. The vote nevertheless strongly weighed against the big money, 62 to 38 percent.
The Wichita City Council had enacted this “economic development” deal with the hotel developers, and that would have been the end of it . . . but for some pesky Wichita taxpayers.
Kansans may lack a statewide initiative and referendum, but there is a local process, so citizens possessed a tool for effective resistance. They formed Tax Fairness for All Wichitans and, working with the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, they hit the streets to gather over 2,700 signatures to require Tuesday’s vote.
After the victory, Bob Weeks, the group’s chair, reminded fellow activists that the battle is far from over:
The Ambassador Hotel is receiving assistance from eight taxpayer-funded government programs with costs of $15.4 million up-front and several hundred thousand annually. None of these were affected by the election. Wichita city hall and its allies are ready, willing, and able to use these incentive programs in the future for other hotels and businesses.
Weeks summed up the election results this way: “The best way to create jobs is to get government out of the way. . . . That is what the voters said tonight.”
On behalf of the new Liberty Initiative Fund, I’m honored to have given two cents worth of advice to their effort. They changed public policy, saved tax dollars and threw a big monkey wrench into the machinery of crony capitalism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It’s getting to become more and more popular to bash initiative rights — even when those rights are not very relevant. I hear rumblings in California that the hopeless Republicans, there, are gearing up for more of such nonsense. But beware, folks: This puts you in very dangerous company, amongst defenders of outright tyranny. See my column at Townhall.com this weekend.
For references associated with that column, click the links below:
For last week’s column, view it on This Is Common Sense.
Last November, Marylanders went to the polls. In addition to choosing candidates to administer their government as well as delegates to legislate for them, there was a ballot question on whether to call a constitutional convention, which, if voters so chose, would provide an opportunity to propose fundamental reforms.
Well, voters so chose. A solid majority — 54.4 percent — voted Yea.
But the Maryland Legislature isn’t setting up the convention.
In a Baltimore Sun op-ed, J.H. Snider, president of iSolon.org, tells the history of the constitutional convention provision in Maryland’s 1851 Constitution: “From 1851 until 1930, the majority required to convene a con-con was interpreted and implemented to mean an ordinary majority.”
But in 1930, when a majority said yes to a convention, the legislature balked, claiming that a convention required a supermajority of all citizens voting in the election. In other words, those not voting on the convention issue were counted as Nay votes.
A legal challenge was brought, but failed, because the counsel to the General Assembly provided, according to Snider, “a remarkably selective and biased interpretation of the con-con debates” for the court. In 1950, again a simple majority called a convention, again legislators shut their ears and, this time, a federal court case failed to decide the matter.
Snider supports a convention as the “best hope for fixing Maryland’s democratic deficits, including its inherently corrupt redistricting system and its legislators’ defiance of popular sentiment on legislative term limits.”
So, he’s suing the Old Line State government “to force it to convene the con-con a majority of Marylanders voted for on Nov. 2, 2010.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Wisconsin Democrats turned in more than a million signatures yesterday to force a recall election for Republican Gov. Scott Walker. That’s far more than the 540,000 signatures required by law.
State officials will now check the signatures and, barring tremendous irregularities, will set an election six to ten weeks after that, depending on whether a primary is needed to determine the Democrats’ candidate. Some recall processes require an up-or-down vote on the official being recalled, but Wisconsin simply holds a new election.
Only two state governors have been successfully recalled in the nation’s entire history: California’s Gray Davis (2003) and North Dakota’s Lynn Frazier (1921). Both deserved it.
Yet, while I applaud the recall as a good process and a fundamental right of citizens — not only did I personally work on the recall of the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, in 2010, I wholeheartedly cheered the recall of Davis — I hope the people of Badger Nation will vote to keep their gutsy governor.
Walker’s reform, making public employees pay more toward their hefty healthcare and pension benefits and restricting collective bargaining by public employee unions, understandably angered the state’s labor unions. But the reform has already saved overburdened taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, a report released by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators shows that districts across the state are financially more secure and have been able to hire more teachers.
The right to recall is essential, but replacing Gov. Walker would punish him for doing what’s right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Last year at this time, I was in Omaha, Nebraska, testifying at a court challenge to the petition drive I had run to put a recall of Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle on the ballot. Recall opponents had hurled baseless charges of “fraud” throughout our signature drive, an increasingly common smear used by the professional left. In the court case, their attorney also tried the old racist tactic of demonizing me as an evil outside agitator. The judge found their charges meritless, writing in his opinion, “Plaintiff introduced evidence to attack the credibility of certain circulators and a Paul Jacob, the coordinator for the paid circulators. . . . This Court found Paul Jacob credible and accepted his testimony as truthful.”
Those powerful political forces opposed to citizens having a say on the ballot, whether through recalls or initiatives or referendums, have made a habit of using nasty, scorched-earth, character-assassinating tactics. They think they can keep good, decent people away from any effort to hold government accountable by being especially dishonest and despicable. We have to prove them wrong at every turn – as we did in Omaha last year.
Michigan has a recall law. Citizens can toss out an unrepresentative representative before you can say Ypsilanti — even if that politician hasn’t committed a crime or tweeted lewd photos of himself.
Well, maybe not Ypsilanti-simple: one must gather enough signatures to reach 25 percent of the contested office’s vote in the previous election.
Since 1954, when the recall provision was added to the Michigan Constitution, only three legislators have been successfully recalled. The first two were Democrats, back in 1983. The third happened just last month. Republican State Senator Paul Scott’s recall was placed on the ballot, largely through the efforts of the state teachers union, and he was voted out.
I wouldn’t have supported Scott’s ouster, but I support the right of citizens everywhere to oust away.
Michigan State Senator John J. Gleason disagrees. To Gleason, three recalls in 57 years are three too many. The Democrat introduced Senate Bill 629, which would gut the right to recall by disallowing it unless the legislator has gone on a crime spree or piled up serious ethical violations.
Just voting our liberties away wouldn’t qualify any longer.
“Nothing unites lawmakers more than making it easier to stay in office,” wrote Mackinac Center for Public Policy President Joe Lehman in the Detroit Free Press. “The voters’ right to recall lawmakers, for expressly political reasons, is a potent check against government overreach that the people should jealously guard irrespective of party.”
Joe’s talking Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Councilman Rick Roelle in Apple Valley, California, says that Wal-Mart “blackmailed the town.”
Blackmail is no small matter. So, what did Wal-Mart do, specifically?
Wal-Mart worked with citizens of Apple Valley, including supplying money, to gather enough petition signatures to place a measure on the local ballot for voters to decide whether Wal-Mart could build a store.
“The initiative process was an opportunity that allowed voters to voice their support for the benefits that Wal-Mart would bring their community,” a spokesperson for Wal-Mart argued, “including jobs, affordable groceries, increased tax revenue, and infrastructure improvements.”
Who’s right?
Aside from the fact that there are many issues the majority has no right to decide, including whether a law-abiding business can open its doors, why not let the people decide? At least a vote of the people is a clearer expression of the public will than a city council decision.
Some complain that even when a local petition qualifies the voters often don’t get a vote. Under state law, if 15 percent of the electorate signs a petition, the matter must be placed on a special election ballot . . . unless the city council enacts it, instead.
Special elections cost big money. Cash-strapped city councils have voted to allow Wal-Mart development, simply (they say) to save the expense of holding an election.
But such “caving in” doesn’t seem like blackmail in light of Menifee’s experience. The Wal-Mart measure there won with 76 percent of the vote.
Unless, like some politicians, you think doing the electorate’s will is “blackmail.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Washington State activist Tim Eyman could celebrate election night. Several of his sponsored anti-red-light-camera initiatives won — in Bellingham and Longview and Monroe.
But his statewide initiative seems to be going down.
Eyman has become obsessed with transportation issues, and he’s receiving the usual push-back from insiders and editorialists. The Seattle Times proclaimed his I-1125 “anachronistic,” saying that Eyman
may have something to say about the scope of government. His anti-tax proposals fare well. But voters do not think much of his ideas for moving — or, more precisely, not moving — people around a busy metropolitan region.
A tad disingenuous. Washington’s voters received a barrage of advertising against the measure, but the campaign tended to ignore the measure’s main point, its attempt to strengthen the feedback systems of paying for (and developing) road projects. I-1125 would have kept politicians’ hands out of the road till, forcing them to leave money in road funds put there by fuel taxes and tolls and such.
Despite the negative campaign, on election night the measure was losing so narrowly that many deemed it “too close to call.”
Contrast this with the common anti-initiative complaint, that voting for them is driven by well-funded campaigns that overpower citizens’ reason. Well, Eyman’s initiative campaigns carry mainly on the written measures themselves: His group spends nothing on paid advertising, while his opponents splurge millions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
More than two decades ago, I got involved in my very first initiative campaign.
In 1990, tax-fighter Jim Tobin, then the head of Taxpayers United of Illinois, filed the Tax Accountability Amendment. I organized the petition drive, which gathered more than half-a-million voter signatures to earn a place on the ballot. Polling showed more than 70 percent support for the issue, but a lawsuit by the Chicago Bar Association struck our initiative from the ballot.
The amendment would have mandated a three-fifths vote of both legislative chambers to increase taxes. By requiring public notice and hearings before a tax hike could be enacted, the amendment also promoted transparency in the legislative process — long before the “transparency” buzzword became cool.
Illinois’s very limited initiative process has allowed for only one issue to appear on the state ballot — a successful 1980 measure, cutting back the number of state legislators and electing them in single member districts.
But even without a vote, Tobin wrested a pledge from both candidates for governor to abide by the provisions of the amendment, which the victorious governor stuck to for several years.
Tobin’s group has grown, finding considerable success battling big taxing politicians. It hasn’t forgotten about transparency, either. The group has launched a national campaign to provide the public with information on lavish and unsustainable pensions being collected by public employees.
Tonight, I’ll be with Jim Tobin at a big event in Chicago celebrating the 35th anniversary of his now national anti-tax organization, Taxpayers United of America.
Congratulations, Jim! Thanks for letting me be a part of it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.