Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

It’s a New Democracy!

Another New Year.

Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?

When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?

After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.

Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.

And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.

Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.

Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.

But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.

Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.

Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative … and a few unashamed exclamation points!!

This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags New Year

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

No Particular Agenda

Agenda-less improvement of Colorado’s constitution is the goal of a “group of Colorado’s top civic leaders, bipartisan in its makeup,” according to the Denver Post. All they want to do is correct constitutional inconsistencies.

The difficulty of getting the revisions is so acute that many of the state’s “top civic leaders” believe that it is time again to press for a constitutional-review commission empowered to send proposed changes to the voters directly, via multi-subject initiatives that can substantially revise, rather than simply amend, the state’s governing charter. (A single-subject rule obtains for hoi-polloi signature-gatherers.)

Must be nigh impossible to get a question on the ballot the way things stand now, eh? But — wait — one of the Civic Leaders pushing for a commission, Bob Tointon, laments that people “are frustrated by the issues that get on the ballot so easily in Colorado.” And Colorado’s Future, the main organization pushing for the commission, has always argued that it’s too darn easy for the mere people to post an initiative.

Which is it? It’s too hard to post a question onto the ballot, or too easy?

Both. It’s too easy for the general public to use the initiative process, but it’s too hard for Civic Leaders to scrub voter-approved initiatives out of existence.

Opponents of this elitist brainstorm worry that the proposed Super-Commission would seek to undermine the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a popular citizen initiative passed two decades ago limiting government spending and requiring voter approval of new taxes. The fear is legitimate.

The long-standing agenda of this cast of Civic Leaders is no secret: kill TABOR.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags Colorado

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Better Than a Thousand Boneheads

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 4, 2012
6 Comments on Better Than a Thousand Boneheads

H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, when they took over the early 20th century journal Smart Set, served it up with a great motto: “One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads.” That’s how I feel about my readers. I almost always enjoy the comments section of ThisIsCommonSense.com, and sometimes learn something important.

I especially enjoy it when my readers show they are on the right track, thinking of reforms that exhibit a sense of both justice and savvy use of incentives and disincentives to restrain the political class. Jennifer Gratz suggests “making the hurdle higher for politicians to get on the ballot”:

Tie ballot access for state-wide candidates to the same burden as initiatives. Names only appear on the ballot if they meet the same signature gathering threshold as a state-wide initiative: same requirements, same laws, same restrictions, same burdens. Win in one state and politicians may stop messing with the I&R process.…

Clever.

As I reported this weekend on Townhall.com, Michigan legislators are in “voter suppression” mode again. It’s no surprise, since politicians tend to “have their own, almost personal, reasons to disdain direct democracy. They see citizen action as direct competition. And so their ‘reform’ ideas so far put forth run the usual gamut of insiders’ vexation with ‘outsiders.’” Perhaps the only permanent solution to constraining their lust to restrict citizen input is to constitutionally put them on the same footing as citizens.

What better place than ballot access for statewide offices?

Were party-supported candidates and incumbents all required to get the same number of signatures onto the ballot as initiative measures, the insiders would just have to lower the required number of signatures.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags George Jean Nathan, H.L. Mencken, Michigan, Smart Set

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall links

Townhall: Voter Suppression

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 2, 2012
1 Comment on Townhall: Voter Suppression

This weekend’s column at Townhall.com covers the perennial legislative itch to suppress citizen input — this time in Michigan. Go on over, but come back here to check out links to relevant articles:

initiative, referendum, and recall video

On the Road in South America, Part Three

Post author By Redactor
Post date November 19, 2012
1 Comment on On the Road in South America, Part Three

Last Friday, at the 2012 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy in Montevideo, Uruguay, Paul interviewed Daniela Bozhinova, a Bulgarian Green Party and direct democracy activist. Daniela spent the better part of a year studying initiative & referendum in the United States as a Fulbright scholar and you might be surprised by what she has to say.