Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Lifetime Politicians Ruin Christmas

Arkansas, term limits, Santa

Legislators, anxious to further weaken their own term limits, placed Issue 2 on the Arkansas ballot. 

The current limit is already a loiteringly long 16 years — thanks to a dishonestly worded, legislatively referred 2014 ballot amendment, which weakened the voter-initiated limits.*  

Voters came back in 2018 to restore the original six-year House and eight-year Senate limits, placing a measure on the ballot that from various public reports received nearly 80 percent of the vote. But an Arkansas supreme court decision forbade counting those votes.

Still, politicians are back with another term limits attack. Issue 2 lowers the 16-year limit to 12 years. Huh, lowers? Stay with me. Issue 2 grandfathers everyone elected this year or before. Current office holders get the full 16 years — plus no lifetime limit (that gets nixed), allowing politicians to return for another 12 years after a short break. 

No wonder the citizens’ group Arkansas Term Limits opposes Issue 2, calling it “The Lifetime Politician Amendment.”

Not unrelated, there is also Issue 3. Arkansas legislators have repeatedly attacked term limits and the only way for citizens to get a real term-limit on the ballot: the citizen petition process. 

“Advocates acknowledged the amendment, [Issue 3], would make it harder to qualify proposals for the ballot,” the Arkansas Times’ Max Brantley explained, “but generally saw that as a good thing.”

One poison-pill provision would slice six months from the petition process, moving the deadline from warm, sunny July to cold, dark January — and forcing campaigns to flood Christmas shopping with petitioners trying to gather signatures.

Call it “The Ruin Christmas Amendment.” 

Putting 2 and 3 together: The Lifetime Politicians Ruin Christmas Amendments.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Want to holler at that politician author who hoodwinked voters? Go to a federal prison . . . where Senator Woods relocated after convictionson political corruption. 

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initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

The Limits of Corruption

Republican Speaker, Larry Householder, bribery

Another corrupt, term-limits-hating, careerist politician bites the dust. 

“Federal prosecutors say Republican Speaker Larry Householder and four others — including a former state GOP chairman — perpetrated a $60 million federal bribery scheme,” reports the Dayton Daily News, “connected to a taxpayer-funded bailout of Ohio’s two nuclear power plants.”

Last year, a citizen-initiated referendum campaign sought to give voters the final say on the legislature’s $1.5 billion baby. “The relentless machinations of HB 6’s backers,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes points out, “kept [that] repeal effort launched against the bill off Ohio’s ballot.”

At a news conference to explain the arrest of Householder and his co-conspirators on racketeering charges, federal prosecutors detailed some of the ways the scheme illegally blocked last year’s referendum effort. 

Now, the rush is on to repeal House Bill 6.

Mr. Suddes is correct that “[t]he legislature also won’t be OK till voters amend the Ohio Constitution to make it easier to place issues on the statewide ballot for up-or-down votes.” 

But when he goes on to argue that term limits are “part of that problem”?

The only thing Ohio’s term limits need is to make the limits lifetime — forbidding legislators from returning after a timeout. Householder had previously been speaker from 2001 to 2004. “While he officially left office due to term limits,” informs the Plain-Dealer, “he departed Columbus amid an FBI investigation that closed without charges.”

Householder also came to our attention back in March, when he called Ohio’s eight-year limits “pretty oppressive.” Before the pandemic, he was pushing a ballot measure designed to weaken the term limits law and serve until 2036 — foreshadowing what Putin* did later in Russia. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I referred to them as “two pols in a pod,” but now, Householder reminds me more of former Arkansas State Sen. Jon Woods, who after sponsoring a deceptive ballot measure to weaken term limits was convicted on multiple felony charges and is serving his current term in prison.

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initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Greater Idaho Goes Forward?

Greater Idaho, state, secession,

An Oregon case, People Not Politicians v. Secretary of State Clarno, was decided last week in favor of People Not Politicians, a group that has struggled obtaining signatures to qualify Initiative Petition 57 (IP 57) for the November 2020 ballot — while observing the governor’s stay-at-home orders.

It is hard to collect petition signatures under social distancing.

So the court is forcing the Secretary of State to give the group some leeway in advancing their redistricting measure.

This is good news for another citizen activist group, Move Oregon’s Border. Chief Petitioner Mike McCarter wants to place initiatives on county ballots in eastern, southern, and southwestern Oregon. His idea is to split off from Willamette Valley politics altogether, leaving wokester Portland — of the comedy Portlandia and antifa riots fame — in the distance.

But he does not want to form a new state. The secession is mere prelude to accession . . . to Idaho!

It has been a long time since the United States has fissioned a state, West Virginia during the Civil War being the most recent — Maine and Kentucky before that.

Great idea? Well, this goes far beyond these two western states. California is ripe for break-up, for by such a political reformation the ratio of citizens to representatives could be increased in favor of citizens.

The idea of calling the proposed new, larger State of Idaho “Greater Idaho” seems a bit much. Surely “Idaho” would do.

But the idea is politically more possible because it wouldn’t change the partisan complexion of the United States Senate, thus avoiding riling up one of the two major parties.

Other fissions, and fusions, would be much harder. Too bad. People should be able to insist on better representation. Democratically.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs term limits

He Tries Harder

Putin, Russia,

He’s the Avis Rent A Car of authoritarianism. 

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is not the most evil tyrant on the planet. That title clearly belongs to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Instead, Putin is No. 2. 

So, of course, he tries harder.

Two years ago, Xi Jinping got the Chinese Communist Party to jettison his term limits without breaking a sweat. Not the slightest pretense of democracy necessary. 

Two weeks ago, Putin finally caught up with Xi by winning an unnecessary and highly fraudulent national referendum designed to legitimize the constitutional jiggering that would allow him to stay in office until he would be 83 years old. 

Beating Joseph Stalin for post-tsar star tsar.

So, how did Putin rig the referendum? 

“Voters are being asked to approve a package of 206 constitutional amendments with a single yes-or-no answer,” explained National Public Radio. Many U.S. states have single-subject requirements for ballot measures to prevent precisely this sort of log-rolling.

Sergey Shpilkin, a well-known Russian physicist, produced statistical evidence that “as many as 22 million votes — roughly 1 in 4 — may have been cast fraudulently,” ABC News reported.

“The European Union regrets that, in the run up to this vote, campaigning both for and against was not allowed,” read a statement from the 27-nation block. With little debate and scant information, the referendum was just pretense.

So, why did Putin go through all the trouble to pretend?

Low approval ratings, a New York Times piece argued, his “lowest level since he first took power 20 years ago.” Putin needed all the help that fake democracy can provide.

Without any of those uncomfortable checks-on-power that real democracy demands.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs

A Deafening Disquiet

Stop Fighting Start Voting, Citizens in Charge Foundation,

“We are living in a world of disquiet,” offers U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres at the beginning of a one-minute video now running on social digital platforms in the U.S. and worldwide.

The advertisement shows political strife in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. It is the opening salvo in a campaign called “Stop Fighting Start Voting,” launched by Citizens in Charge Foundation today with support from direct democracy experts and organizations across the globe — researchers, advocates, NGOs, and academics. 

As scenes from the Hong Kong protests unfold, a woman tells a newscaster that China’s new “national security law” will “take away our freedoms . . . our rule of law.” The spot then pivots to Sri Lanka, lamenting “possible war crimes” and noting that a U.N. panel found “40,000 Tamil civilians were killed” at the end of the country’s civil war a little more than a decade ago.

“We hope to have the right to vote,” a Tamil says as the video ends.

The Stop Fighting Start Voting campaign seeks to increase awareness of unresolved conflicts, such as the struggle for basic democracy in Hong Kong or concerning a referendum for the establishment of a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. We do not advocate for or against the underlying issues in these often bitter disputes, but advance the use of direct democracy, voters weighing in through ballot referendums conducted under accepted international norms and procedures, to achieve a peaceful resolution.

Self-determination takes a lot of determination. So does the establishment of basic democracy with human rights. That’s why non-governmental organizations and concerned citizens must step up. 

Don’t leave the future of freedom and democracy in this world to governments alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Erecting Democracy

statue, racism, mob,

Though I opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was not at all offended when an Iraqi mob toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. 

I liked it. That statue was a symbol of oppression.

In my mind, at least. 

I guess that’s the rub, eh? A symbol of oppression to one person might be an important piece of history to another.

Here in the good ole USA, we now have our own variant of statue roulette going on, of course. And I wonder: Can we not find a better way to decide public policy regarding statue removal than today’s status quo of leaving it up to roaming, violent mobs? Iconoclastic crowds that, we can see, have some trouble coherently identifying the enemy symbols they seek to vandalize.*

“[T]he choice in 2020 is very simple,” offers President Trump. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Actually, cancel those calisthenics.

Let’s vote on the issue. 

Either lawmakers or citizens should initiate ballot measures, city by city, state by state, asking voters to choose: keep or remove said statute(s).

The advantages?

  • A more fair and democratic approach, for starters. 
  • Less public policy decision-making by mobs.
  • No one else need be critically injured from faulty statue-removal efforts.

Perhaps most important of all, a real discussion and debate can take place.

Where all sides can be heard. 

Whatever decisions get made regarding any given monument, we would at least better understand each other.

Let’s stop fighting and start voting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Monuments to famous abolitionists, Matthias Baldwin and John Greenleaf Whittier, as well as a memorial to fallen Union soldiers, who gave their “last full measure of devotion” to end slavery, have been defaced or destroyed. “The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery,” said a Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park member, “is lost on the morons who don’t know their history.” 

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initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Impeachments Are Forever?

Pharaoh Thutmose III, history, myth, memory,

The impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, just concluded in the Senate with an acquittal, was — so far as the Senate trial portion of the exercise is concerned — the least partisan presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

That’s because Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was the first senator ever to vote against his own party in such a proceeding.

Before we give the notorious flip-flopper a ticker-tape parade, or query too deeply into his personal animus against Trump, let’s acknowledge that the House impeachment, proper, was heavily partisan, and is only going to get more-so.

What? you ask.

How can a past event get more or less of anything?

Well, House Republicans, expecting a big backlash against Democrats next November, are already plotting to “expunge” the impeachment from the record. 

As if to stick it to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre point that her House’s action would be “an impeachment that lasts forever.”

Sorta like Pharaoh Thutmose III chiseling his mother’s name — Hatshepsut — off the monuments of Egypt.

The Republicans’ planned “damnatio memoriae” is a good clue to the moral of this story: the impeachment process is . . . “not good,” to apply a Trumpian mantra.

Now, the process of impeachment has long seemed to me like a great idea — another one from those wise framers of the Constitution.

But with persistent partisanship, this constitutional recourse has not worked out very well. 

Overall. 

Historically.

Whether in 1868, with Democrat Andrew Johnson, or 1999, with Democrat Bill Clinton, or today, with Trump’s failed ouster, the impeachment process has proved (Romney notwithstanding) maddeningly partisan, and looks like it will only get more partisan — with House Democrats already talking about a second impeachment of Trump.

We need some new form of recall.

Citizen-based, perhaps?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pharaoh Thutmose III, history, myth, memory,

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initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Gig Is Up

California, gig, freelance, law, control, interference, intervention, labor,

Eventually, champions of government intervention, of all forms of thwarting independent judgment and killing dreams, find themselves under assault. From the public. 

And you don’t need an economics degree to grasp why. 

Initially, an intervention prevents other people from pursuing projects, getting jobs, earning a living. Then, finally, government meddling goes a step too far. Maybe lawmakers had “good intentions,” but hey! This is me now! 

Your legislation needs tweaking!

This is where we are in California’s attack on the so-called gig economy. Hatched to “protect” Uber drivers or some such nonsense, Assembly Bill 5 makes it massively harder for companies to classify freelancers as independent contractors. After it was signed into law, many companies—from blogs to transcription services—told California-based freelancers adios. 

Millions of people lost work and options.

What walks of life are affected? All. 

“California’s new gig worker law is . . . threatening all performing arts,” complains Brendan Rawson at CalMatters.org. California has “overreached.” Gotta nip-and-tuck that otherwise “worthy” bill! Use only the magic arbitrary intervention in our lives that works!

Not everybody now being hurt was previously okay with pushing other people around, of course. I’ve never been a fan. One of my missions is defending the right of citizen initiative. Well, AB5 makes it much harder and more expensive for petition campaigns to hire people for such gigs as collecting signatures for an initiative in California. 

AB5 attacks earning a living, speaking freely, associating freely, and petitioning one’s government freely. Maybe the law will be rescinded. But there’s more mischief where that came from. 

So let’s protect other people’s freedom . . . and stop the overreach before it reaches us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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California, gig, freelance, law, control, interference, intervention, labor,

Photo by Dairo Cervantes

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initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Extraordinarily Unusual

Tim Eyman

“It’s a government-on-government fight,” reports Seattle-based KOMO News, as the Pierce County Council voted 4-3 to provide assistance in defending Initiative 976 in court.

The ballot measure, which limits car license fees among other provisions, passed 53 to 47 percent statewide last month, including a whopping 66 percent affirmative vote in Pierce County. And — you guessed it — I-976 was immediately swarmed by life-devouring locusts — er, I mean, sued by “a handful of counties, cities, transportation agencies, and one transit rider.”

In short, many governments seek to undo a vote of the people . . . along with a lone citizen to serve as fig leaf.

Against only one government, Pierce County, now joining the voters.

Late last month, a judge in King County, one of only four counties (out of the state’s 39) to vote against I-976, issued a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the initiative, while the case is being adjudicated.   

The voter-approved measure does have Attorney General Bob Ferguson lawyering on its behalf. But Mr. Ferguson has been engaged in a multi-year civil lawsuit against Tim Eyman, the sponsor of 976. The two aren’t friends. And the AG is no friend of lower taxes, either. No surprise, then, for Eyman to talk of “sabotage” and Ferguson’s mere pro forma defense: “he truly doesn’t want it to succeed.”

This isn’t a government-on-government fight, but governments-versus-voters. With the wonderful exception of Pierce County, where political representation still lives.

“This is the first time a government has ever actually done something to defend a citizen initiative,” remarked Eyman at a Tuesday news conference. 

“It is really extraordinarily unusual,” he added.

That’s how out-of-control government in our “democracy” is. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tim Eyman

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initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

My Favorite Control Group

Tim Eyman

Tim Eyman strikes again. 

In deep blue Washington State, the ballot measure activist celebrated another Election Day victory last week with Initiative 976, limiting vehicle taxes. Not to mention Referendum 88, whereby voters kept a ban on government use of racial preferences, enacted via an initiative Eyman had co-authored two decades ago.

And still, there were a dozen more issues on last Tuesday’s statewide ballot thanks to Mr. Eyman’s 2007 initiative, I-960, which mandates “advisory votes on taxes enacted without voter approval.” (Also thanks to state legislators, I guess, for racking up 12 new tax increases this year without bothering to ask voters!)

Yet, perhaps it matters not at all. Nearly two million votes cast on each of these measures? Three supported by a majority? Nine rejected? Two esteemed Evergreen State newspaper columnists pooh-pooh them as “meaningless.”

“The Legislature has never taken the voters’ advice when they say a tax should be repealed,” writes Spokane Spokesman Review columnist Jim Camden. 

That’s a failing of the Legislature, Jim,* not these advisory measures . . . which you seem to acknowledge when you write that these votes at least “provide a good control group for any experiment on the voters’ knee jerk reaction to higher taxes.”

If legislators cared to know. 

While dumping on the dozen measures as “an empty remnant of an earlier initiative,” The Columbian’s Greg Jayne notices that “their presence on the ballot this year reminded voters, over and over again, of the Legislature’s spendthrift ways.”

Helping create an anti-tax mood that spurred support for I-976.

Not bad for being meaningless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I use his first name because I know Mr. Camden from decades ago when he was a reporter covering House Speaker Tom Foley, who after suing to overturn the 1992 citizen initiative for term limits became the only Speaker defeated for reelection since the Civil War. 

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Tim Eyman

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