For people who claim to care so much about the democratic process, opponents of Article XIV don't seem to have much faith in the voters. How else do you explain their desperate efforts to keep the spending-cap measure off the ballot, except as a measure of contempt for democracy?
Rather than rely on open debate in the marketplace of ideas, groups like the Missouri Budget Project, Fired Up! Missouri and AFT Missouri are expending energy to dissuade people from signing petitions to put Article XIV on the ballot. They're even trying to convince people who have signed to remove their names from the petition.
So far, their efforts haven't been very successful. The measure is on-track to appear on the ballot in November, and
The Columbia Daily Tribune reported on May 2 that nobody has asked to be removed from the petition.
Still, this attack on the petitioning process -- really an attack on the initiative process -- is worrisome because it's part of a larger pattern. In 2003,
Brainstorm NW, a regional magazine in Oregon,
documented union-backed assaults on the petitioning process that have escalated to harassment and even violence. Just this past December,
The Oklahoman editorialized against the Oklahoma Education Association for advising its membership to harass petitioners.
Whatever your opinion on Article XIV, Missourians deserve a good debate, not imported strong-arm tactics meant to cripple democracy.
Harassment as debate
Earlier, I blogged about how opponents of Article XIV, the initiative to control state spending, are interfering in the signature-gathering efforts of petitioners who are trying to put the measure on the ballot. Now comes word from St. Louis that AFSCME, the government employees union, has been paying people to argue with petitioners. The apparent goal is to harass and discourage petitioners from gathering signatures. All of this follows the pattern first established in Oregon by the union-backed
Voter Education Project (VEP). All that's missing are the red shirts the VEP gave its goons.
The latest potshot at a citizens initiative
The AARP has been among the groups squealing the loudest about Article XIV. AARP leaders clearly don't want Missourians to take state spending decisions into their own hands and away from politicians. The latest salvo fired by the AARP is an
OpEd in
The Kansas City Star by Rosetta Robins, the group's state president. Before Article XIV is even on the ballot, she's exhorting state residents to oppose the measure.
To Robins's credit, she doesn't
explicitly say that people shouldn't sign Article XIV petitions to put the spending cap on the ballot where its fate can be decided by voters. But how else to interpret her screed this early in the game?
Michigan initiatives targeted
Once again, opponents of popular ballot measures are turning to anti-democratic means for achieving their goals. This time, a Michigan group called Democracy for Metro Detroit is urging voters to refuse to sign petitions for the Single Business Tax Repeal initiative and the Stop OverSpending initiative.
Why is this group so dead-set on keeping these measures off the ballot?
Well, in
their own words:
We don't want either proposal on the ballot because we would have to be the ones to educate the voters on what those reasons is best.
No, I don't know what that means either. But it boils down to an effort to head off democratic debate by keeping the voters from even considering ballot initiatives.
That's just not right.
Public property not open to the public?
The initiative and referendum process is as pure an expression of direct democracy as you'll find in the United States, so why are politicians and bureaucrats sabotaging the efforts of petitioners? A St. Louis city official was caught demanding that people circulating petitions show their "license." For the record, no such document is required. Even worse, officials at the Ozark post office had a petitioner
arrested for trespassing on post office grounds. Would somebody like to explain to me how a member of the public gathering initiative petition signatures for a ballot measure on public property constitutes "trespassing?"
Voters blocked in Missouri
If you're authoritarian-minded, it must be nice to have the power to decide which ballot initiatives will appear before the voters and which won't. Then you don't have to worry about propositions you dislike winning passage; you just prevent the people from casting their votes one way or the other.
Yes, it must be nice to be Missouri Secretary of State
Robin Carnahan.
Carnahan has announced that both an initiative to reform the use of eminent domain and an inititaive to cap state spending will be barred from the ballot -- ostensibly because the petition pages were not ordered sequentially according to county. Piddling regulations like that exist for only one purpose -- to give politicians cover when they want to exercise their whims. And make no mistake, Carnahan doesn't want these measures to pass. Both of them would limit the power of government, and that just doesn't square with her political views.
I doubt the battle is over yet. But Carnahan's move is an eye-opener for all Missourians concerned about the health of democracy in their state.
