PERSONAL POLITICAL POWER CAN SEDUCE ANYONE

Ventura sells out citizens on issue of direct democracy
By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist, 09/23/99

(This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 09/23/99)

 In 24 states, not including Minnesota, Americans enjoy the ultimate power 
of self-government: They can vote to adopt or repeal laws at the ballot 
box. As a candidate for governor last year, Jesse Ventura assured 
Minnesotans that while they may have missed out on the first century of 
initiative and referendum - the first state to adopt them was South Dakota,
in 1898 - they would be on board for the next one..

''Initiative and referendum give people the right to bring things before 
the general population that the Legislature cannot or will not,'' Ventura 
said. ''Government is supposed to be for the people, by the people. The 
powers of initiative and referendum directly support that proposition.''

But now that Ventura has traded in his gold lame wrestling shorts for a 
politician's pinstripe suit, he's decided he doesn't think so highly of the
people's judgment after all.

''While it would be refreshing to give the absolute will of the people a 
chance to be heard on specific issues,'' he wrote this month in a letter to
The Wall Street Journal, ''it often results in too many laws being proposed
and too much confusion for voters on Election Day. Perhaps more 
importantly, well-financed special interests can circumvent the legislative
process to push an agenda.''

Wrong on all counts. Ballots are not flooded with initiatives in the states
that allow them, voters have no trouble passing judgment on complicated 
measures, and big-money interest groups that manage to get their pet bills 
on the ballot are routinely shot down on Election Day.

The arguments against letting the voters occasionally decide an issue 
directly are not new, and they haven't improved with age. What most of them
have in common is the belief that ordinary voters are dumber than ordinary 
legislators. Voters won't consider the merits of ballot measures, the 
critics say. They'll be easily swayed by slick ad campaigns. They won't 
take the state's best interests into account. They are liable to pass 
foolish laws or repeal sensible ones.

There is a comical paradox to such arguments. If voters are too foolish to 
be trusted with initiatives and referendums, how can they be wise enough to
vote for legislators? Conversely, if legislators are such paragons of 
wisdom and insight, why do voters - in poll after poll, state after state -
express frustration at the refusal of lawmakers to deal with issues they 
care about most?

Activists typically resort to the initiative process when they have 
exhausted every other means of getting a grievance redressed. When the 
Legislature refuses to act, when the courts are no help, when the governor 
can't be bothered, when the newspapers give them short shrift, when paid 
lobbyists block them at every turn, ballot activists have one last hope: 
the people. And the people, time and again, come through.

Ballot initiatives have been deployed to give women the right to vote, to 
mandate an eight-hour workday, to abolish poll taxes, to cut onerous taxes.
Initiatives and referendums - I&R, in political argot - have been used to 
ban steel traps in hunting, to legalize medical marijuana, to limit 
politicians' terms in office, to overhaul campaign finance laws, to end 
racial preferences, to abolish rent control, to repeal blue laws, and to 
mandate English instruction in the schools. Some of these are liberal 
reforms, some are conservative; none is trivial. And most went on the 
ballot because elected legislators preferred to do nothing.

I&R is constantly under attack. In Nebraska, the Legislature's bosses want 
to change the rules so that ballot measures would have to be approved in 
two elections before taking effect. In California, a bill in the state 
Senate would require all initiative signature-gatherers to publicize - 
right on the petition - the names of their major financial contributors.

In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that any stray mark 
on a petition - a doodle, a coffee stain, an underline - invalidates every 
signature on the page. In Colorado, the high court has been obsessively 
killing initiatives on the grounds that they run afoul of a rule requiring 
ballot measures to deal with only a single subject. In Oregon, opponents of
direct democracy want to increase sharply the number of signatures required
to qualify an initiative for the ballot. In Alaska, a proposed change would
require signatures from 30 of the state's 40 legislative districts before a
measure could go to the voters - a huge hurdle in a state as vast as 
Alaska.

It isn't only legislators who recoil from I&R. Business interests fight it,
too. They reckon that it's easier to buy a few hundred state reps than a 
few hundred thousand voters. Clearly it is easier to promote a bad bill in 
a closed-door huddle at the statehouse than to defend the same bill openly 
in a public campaign.

Laws voted on at the ballot box tend to be more carefully vetted, more 
thoroughly debated, and more widely understood than those gaveled through 
on pro-forma voice votes in the capitol. Jesse Ventura frets that allowing 
voters to consider a few ballot measures every other year would lead to 
''too many laws being proposed'' - yet in a typical two-year session, the 
Minnesota Legislature disposes of 6,000 pieces of legislation. The worst 
laws are always the ones passed out of sight, behind the voters' backs. 
Candidate Ventura, who ran on a platform of ''Bringing Power Back to the 
People,'' understood that. Who'd have guessed that Governor Ventura would 
sell out so quickly?