Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Empowering Abuse of Power

Have a yen to cling indefinitely to political power? You probably oppose term limits … as well as the citizen initiative rights enabling voters to term-​limit you.

And when voters possess both initiative rights and a willingness to exercise them, it wouldn’t surprise me if you pray that any judge assessing a duly petitioned-​for term limits question deems it unconstitutional. Even if it’s garnered 596,140 signatures, 300,000 more than the minimum valid signatures required.

You guessed it: Not a hypothetical scenario. And not, of course, about you.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner is leading to impose eight-​year term limits on all legislative service in Illinois. The petition has more than enough valid signatures to reach the ballot. But incumbents sued, citing an early 1990s decision by the Illinois Supreme Court that declared a different term limits question unconstitutional.

Cook County Judge Mary Mikva agrees; “precedent dictates a very narrow provision for allowing the voters to directly enact term amendments to the Illinois Constitution.” Her June 27 ruling is being appealed.

The state’s notoriously corrupt political class may wish upon a constellation, but wishing won’t make the cited precedent relevant.

As Jacob Huebert, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, argued in a recent op-​ed, “term limits are exactly the type of provision the Constitution’s framers thought citizens should be allowed to propose and vote on.” He added, “This isn’t just a common-​sense reading of what the Illinois Constitution says; it’s also what its framers said explicitly when they included this provision.”

The stated aim of republican constitutions in America has never been to protect incumbents from effective citizen oversight and control.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Closed: No Competition

Ancient societies were mostly closed societies. Modern society (at least as conceived by most of America’s “founding fathers”) was to be something very different: open.

But today there’s way too much “managed” competition, basically closing out businesses not on some insider list.

Julie Crowe, a veteran of the armed forces and lifelong resident of Bloomington, Illinois, wanted to start up a van ride service, mainly to drive party-​going Illinois State students safely home. There are big buses for Bloomington revelers, but no vans.  Her new service would have provided interesting competition for existing outfits, and her idea of providing safer, more personal, comfier rides home — arguably better than taxicabs, and certainly better than the buses — smacks of a plausible business plan.

But the city denied her a permit to even try, on the grounds that her proposal wasn’t “in the public interest.”

Preposterous, of course. Or, as her lawyer, Jacob Huebert, puts it,

How can city planners know the “right” number of vehicles to serve the community? They can’t possibly know that, any more than they can know the right number of supermarkets or the right number of restaurants.

Huebert is associate counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute, which has as its stated goal ensuring “that the rights to earn a living and to start a business, which are essential to a free and prosperous society, are available not just to a politically privileged few, but to all.”

A great cause. The “eternal vigilance” required to establish and maintain a free, open society means challenging idiotic government encroachments one case at a time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.