Tag: Arkansas

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election law general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Politicians Revolt Against Voters

Arkansas, citizen's initiative, voting, Democracy

“[C]urrently, in the state of Arkansas, out-​of-​state special interest groups that come to our state can try to change our laws and change our constitution,” Rep. Kendon Underwood, the Republican sponsor of House Bill 1419, testified “by just getting signatures from 15 counties.”

In the over 100-​year history of citizen-​initiated ballot measures in Arkansas, no initiative has ever qualified with signatures from only 15 counties. Zero. Moreover, to pass a statutory or constitutional initiative requires much more than merely gathering petition signatures; it mandates a majority vote of the people of Arkansas.

As for “out-​of-​state” special interests, the ballot issues referred by legislators last election received more such funding than the lone citizen-​initiated measure. 

There’s more to unpack. 

“Changing” the state constitution is too easy? Well, HB-​1419 hikes up the constitutional requirement that citizen petitions qualify in “at least 15 counties” to now 50 counties out of Arkansas’s 75 counties — a more than 300 percent increase. 

You read that correctly. Mr. Underwood’s proposes to amend the constitution with a simple statute. Textbook unconstitutionality. Yet, that statute has now passed both houses of the legislature and Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she will sign it.

In both 2020 and 2022, legislators placed constitutional amendments on the ballot to entice Arkansans to vote away their initiative and referendum power. Both times Natural State voters said no. One of the provisions defeated in 2020 would have increased the number of counties in which petitions must reach a threshold to 45.

After voters rebuffed legislators on those amendments, the politicians now decide to weasel their way around the constitutional restraint. 

My, they’re real politicians now!

Legislators also declared “an emergency” so HB-​1419 will immediately go into effect, because there’s an urgent need “to enhance and protect Arkansans’ voice in the ballot initiative and referendum process.” 

Why not tell the Big Lie? They’ve told every other size.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

You’re Sued!

Arkansas, term limits

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.

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meter /​ JG

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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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Accountability scandal

Dispatched

911, flood, call, recording,

The 911 call released last weekend is … hard to forget. It is the one where, as The New York Times reports, “The dispatcher, Donna Reneau, repeatedly told a sobbing Ms. [Debbie] Stevens to calm down.”

With a tone — condescending and worse.

As television station KATV informs, the 911 operator “was working her last shift after previously resigning,” when she “answered Stevens’ call for help” and “can be heard yelling at her.”

Delivering newspapers at 4 am in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Stevens was caught up in rapidly rising flood waters and washed off the road.

The water is “all the way up to my neck,” Stevens desperately told dispatcher Reneau. “I’m the only one in the vehicle with all of my papers floating around me. Please help me. I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to die,” the dispatcher replied. “I don’t know why you’re freaking out.”

“This will teach you next time,” she lectured, “don’t drive in the water.”

Indeed, Ms. Stevens will never again “drive in the water.” 

She died. 

In fact, she had not driven into the water, but drowned in the rising flood water that overtook her SUV nonetheless.

Following release of audio from the 911 call, the Ft. Smith police acknowledged that the dispatcher sounded “calloused and uncaring at times.”

Dispatcher Reneau’s behavior wasn’t criminal, however, says her supervisor. And having already quit, she cannot be fired. 

Perhaps there is a lesson: More often than we know it folks don’t so much need a tongue-​lashing or an eye-​roll or a dismissive tone as much as they need some help.

Especially important if you work for 911.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

911, flood, call, recording,

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Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

The Rest of the News

Matt Pitsch, Arkansas, initiative, citizen, ballot,

Reid Wilson’s very welcome reporting in The Hill, recently, was headlined, “GOP legislators clamping down on voter initiatives.” 

This disrespect for the people and their basic, democratic check on legislative power is far too common, and something about which people need to know. 

For instance, ballot measures in Florida already must garner a supermajority of 60 percent to win, but politicians are now proposing that threshold be hiked still higher to 67 percent. Not to mention bills to burden petitioners with unconstitutional restrictions.

Though most of the attacks are coming from Republican-​dominated legislatures, the article also made clear that Democratic Party legislators in several liberal states — California, Oregon, Washington — are also trying to “take power away from voters.”

But the article lacked some very pertinent information, allowing politicians to make some terribly misleading charges against direct democracy. 

“In the last seven elections, we’ve actually changed our constitution 20 times,” complains Arkansas State Sen. Mat Pitsch, the sponsor of legislation making petitioning for citizen-​initiated ballot measures more onerous. “We’re averaging three changes every other year. Things that normally are voted on by elected representatives were making their way through constitutional ballot measures.”

Sen. Pitsch thinks legislators should make these decisions, instead of voters. How convenient. 

But the state’s motto is “The People Rule.”

Honest people can disagree about how often state constitutions should be amended, but 20 amendments in 14 years does not make Arkansas one of the more prolific states. Moreover, consider the genesis of those 20 amendments. Only three were citizen-​sponsored measures; the other 17, the vast majority, were placed on the ballot by … legislators! 

A fact the reader should have been told.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Matt Pitsch, Arkansas, initiative, citizen, ballot,

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Catnip for Arrogant Politicians

Alan Clark, Arkansas, term limits,

Arkansas Sen. Alan Clark pretends that his bill, Senate Joint Resolution 15, would toughen the term limits that apply to him.

Clark’s masterpiece, which sailed through the Senate 27 – 3 on Tuesday, most certainly does not. While it purports to toughen term limits from 16 years to 12 years, read the fine print.*

First, these legislators are grandfathering themselves in at 16 years. 

Second, Clark’s amendment removes the current lifetime limit, allowing politicians to return to office after just four years out.

For another 12 years.

And then perhaps an additional dozen years.**

What is going on here, you ask?

Well, in 2014, Arkansas legislators had tricked voters, referring a dishonestly worded measure onto the ballot. It claimed to establish term limits and ban gifts from lobbyists to legislators. The amendment accomplished neither; lobbyists continue to ply legislators with food and drink while existing term limits were weakened.

Last year, a citizens group turned in 135,000 voter signatures to place the strict limits citizens had originally enacted (1992) onto the ballot. But a lobbyist lawsuit with technical signature challenges won a 4 – 3 state supreme court decision blocking the initiative. 

Nonetheless, it was too late to remove the measure from the ballot. Votes were cast, just not counted. Fortunately, the Arkansas Times’ Max Brantley released vote totals in three large counties showing that the citizen-​sponsored term limits had won big.

Which scared Arkansas’ prima-​donna careerists, Clark especially, to create the current exercise in representing themselves, not the citizens of Arkansas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Clark’s constitutional amendment originally contained a provision taking term limits for state legislators out of voters’ hands by banning use of the initiative process to propose changes. Thereafter, only legislators could address the length of their own careers. That bit of self-​interested boss-​rule was jettisoned, apparently, as too obviously and arrogantly anti-voter.

** Those additional years — which, depending upon longevity, could extend past three decades — come with additional pension benefits, too.

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Alan Clark, Arkansas, term limits,

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