Ultimately, we can blame it on Kansas.
When a government is failing its citizens, the population has always had one powerful tool at its disposal to force a course correction or manually insert their will upon the laws of the state. That tool? The tried, trusted, and true ballot initiative.
Now there are plenty of examples of ballot initiatives being used for items both good and bad over the years. I’m not concerned about which side of the aisle your politics fall on, or where you land on certain issues that have been approved via initiative in the past. What I’m more concerned about is the future of the initiatives themselves. The continued livelihood of one of our few safeguards keeping our democratic republic committed to the, well, democratic side of that equation.
Most state legislatures have not yet been bold enough - or dumb enough - to do away with the measures outright. Instead, many are proposing different means of limiting their effectiveness or success. Increased filing fees. High signature requirements. Or, like Ohio is proposing, doing away with the majority threshold and making up a new number, like 60%, that’ll be needed to pass an initiative.
All of this should be concerning to citizens regardless of their political leanings for one reason: it represents the first in what is sure to be a series of power transfers from the hands of the voters to the hands of the legislators. And in a time when many Americans feel that we’ve gotten far too polarized in our nation, more power in the hands of legislators may not be the solution many had in mind.
Safeguard
Ballot initiatives, in a way, represent both a safeguard and a shortcut at the same time. They’re a shortcut due to their nature to cut right through the debate and political gamesmanship of a typical legislative session to push a measure right through to law. If legislators can’t secure enough votes in their respective chambers to pass through legislation that’s wildly popular, the people themselves can do it via the ballot.
This has been used for medicinal (or recreational) marijuana legalization, wage items, voting rights, and any number of smaller issues. In many states, the initiative’s usefulness is already limited, as it has to be referred to the citizens by the legislature. A little less than half allow them to be citizen-initiated.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The New Millennial - Business, Culture & Society to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.