Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Amazing Vanished Rights

Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.

Yet you’re legally chained to a chair.

By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem.

But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.

Or is it?

In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted.

Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.

That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.

Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.

According to Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”

Do justice, justices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Brad Little, democracy, governor, initiative

initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

You’re Sued!

Firing politicians is what democracy’s all about.

But politicians don’t like being fired. Even when “You’re fired!” is a signature line. It definitely explains why incumbents tend to oppose term limits.

As shown in the long history of term limits in my home state, Arkansas.

In 1992, an all-volunteer petition drive placed the initiative on the ballot and a grassroots campaign beat the Good Ole Boy network and their $500,000 in paid media warnings of “outsiders.”

The victory sent shockwaves through the Arkansas political establishment; term limits received more YES votes than President-Elect Bill Clinton had garnered in his home state.

Arkansas pols have been at war with term limits ever since. The latest assault came in April, when legislators passed an “emergency” measure now known as Act 951.

The Act bans people found guilty of minor misdemeanors (trespassing, vandalism, any violation of drug laws) at any time in their lives — even many decades ago — from working as paid petitioners. The new law also limits the pool of petitioners to state residents, something not done for any other political job, or for those carrying Arkansas’s candidate petitions.*

That’s why Arkansas Term Limits, Liberty Initiative Fund, U.S. Term Limits, et al., filed a complaint in the federal Eastern District of Arkansas alleging constitutional rights violations under the legislature’s Act 951.

“I was never a supporter of term limits until this bunch got in office,” offered Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley in response to our lawsuit, “and gave themselves essentially unlimited terms and set about running roughshod over human rights.”

Cries of “You’re fired!” are coming soon. But first, to pry back petition rights in Arkansas, the catchphrase is, “You’re sued!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In recent years, similar residency requirements have been unanimously struck down in rulings of the 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Earlier this year, a federal judge enjoined enforcement of Maine’s similar law.

PDF for printing

meter / JG

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Arkansas, democracy, initiative, term limits

ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for pr i nting

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Chicago, journalism, Lori Lightfoot, media, race

initiative, referendum, and recall

Death Star Destroys Democracy

Post author By Editor
Post date May 17, 2021
No Comments on Death Star Destroys Democracy

Mississippi, democracy, citizen initiative

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

That’s Obi-Wan Kenobi’s line in the original Star Wars movie, sensing that the Empire’s Death Star had obliterated all the inhabitants of the Planet Alderaan.

It popped into my mind on Friday, after learning of the ruling handed down by the Mississippi Supreme Court that not only strikes down a medical marijuana ballot initiative passed by voters last November but “judicially kills Mississippi’s citizen initiative process,” as Justice James Maxwell wrote in his fiery dissent.

The Magnolia State’s entire initiative process has been destroyed.

When the direct citizen initiative process was enacted, in 1992, Mississippi sported five congressional representatives. The constitutional provision setting out how to qualify an initiative was worded to allow only “one-fifth” of the required petition signatures to come from any of the state’s five congressional districts (CDs). After the 2000 census, however, the state lost a congressional seat. Now with only four, simple math does not allow a way to get the prescribed balance of signatures.

Talk about a catch-22!

State officials just kept using their old maps with five CDs for ballot initiatives in order to comply with the letter of the law. But the court says that does not suffice.

Only a constitutional amendment can restore this citizen check on politicians, and after the court’s ruling, only the legislature can place that amendment on the ballot.

“Legislative leaders have not said clearly why they have not updated the initiative process in the 20 years since Mississippi lost a congressional district,” the Jackson Clarion Ledger reported Friday.

That’s simple: They don’t want citizens to have a check on them.

Can citizens strike back?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Mississippi voters first passed an initiative and referendum process in 1914 and the state supreme court upheld the validity of the process against a legal challenge in 1916. But after a 1922 initiative ruffled establishment feathers, the state supreme court reversed its earlier ruling and struck down the process in total. It was not until 70 years later, that the legislature would act to restore some measure of citizen initiative.

PDF for printing

starry sky /space ship / flag / JGill / 🎨

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags citizen's initiative, democracy, Mississippi

education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Organizing an Ouster

Despite everything, public schooling can help kids learn some important things.

But this schooling is also something that kids have to survive. If and when Johnny can’t add, spell, figure out who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, or relate premises to a conclusion — the lessons and educational theories he’s been subjected to often have something to do with it.

Now Johnny is being told, if his skin is white, that he must feel guilty about his skin color and work to find, dwell on, and exterminate super-subtle racism buried deep within his privileged soul. He can’t just be happy and learn.

The rationale for this assault on the individual is called “critical race theory.” And in some school districts, this mislabeled “antiracist” indoctrination is being imposed on students (as it is also being imposed throughout society).*

Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, are fighting back by forming a PAC with the mission of ejecting purveyors of critical race theory from the school board. The PAC is led by Ian Prior, who says that county parents “cannot wait until 2023 to elect new leaders.”

Board members must be recalled because of the board’s failure to reopen schools, its imposition of “dangerously divisive critical race theory,” and its cooperation with “tactics designed to intimidate students, parents and teachers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Good luck, parents.

And if you can find a way to educate your kids without sending them to public schools, I suggest that you consider that alternative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Take Action

* “On April 19, 2021, the Biden Administration proposed a rule,” alerts Heritage Action, “that would allow the Department of Education to prioritize recipients to receive K‑12 grants if they include critical race theory in their curriculum.” The Federal Register is accepting public comments on the proposed rule here until May 19.

PDF for printing

Child / Letters / FreeImmages / Bubbles / JGill 😇/ 🎨

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Critical Race Theory, education, schools

incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall

Christmas in California?

“Gray Davis was never in a position to play Santa Claus,” said Steve Maviglio, press flack for the former California governor who was recalled by voters in 2003.

Maviglio was comparing Davis’ relative misfortune, back then — in not having a pandemic and the resulting economic stimulus — to today’s prospects for current Governor Gavin Newsom, who likewise faces a citizen-initiated recall. Yet, while 18 years ago Davis both cut budgets and raised taxes, Newsom has now discovered an extra $100 billion of spendable funds to let him off that hook.

California’s whopping budget surplus of $75.7 billion? Just the beginning. Democrats in Congress wanted to help with even more tax dollars, voting to drop-ship Golden State pols another $26 billion as part of the stimulus bill … which every Republican opposed, calling it at the time a move to “supply the Governor of California with a special slush fund.”

“Newsom wants to hand out cash before California recall election,” Politico headlined its story on Monday, informing that the embattled governor was quick to “tell Californians he wants to give them cash and pay some of their utility bills and back rent,” and noting specifically: “Checks would arrive in voters’ mailboxes not long before ballots do this fall.”

One key part of Newsom’s $100 billion “California Comeback Plan” is to give $600 “to some two-thirds of state residents in households making up to $75,000, along with $500 to families with dependents.”*

“It’s very significant,” offered former Gov. Davis, arguing “the future looks brighter as evidenced by the checks the public will soon receive.”

Whose future, precisely? Not Californians, really. Newsom’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Unlike the federal stimulus aid, undocumented immigrants and their families will be eligible to receive a state tax rebate,” The Sacramento Bee explained. “In fact, undocumented immigrants with dependent children will be eligible for $1,000 for family checks, double what other California families will receive, in order to make up for the lack of support at the federal level, according to Finance Director Keely Bosler.” [Emphasis added.] Must they document that they are undocumented?

PDF for printing

Photo by Rob Growler / Photo by Gage Skidmore

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts