In previous postings, Don has discussed some of his reservations about voter initiative. Don’s reservations, however, should not be confused with the weakest argument against voter initative, the argument that VI is inherently an affront to American-style representative democracy.
In a Projo op-ed, State Representative John Patrick Shanley frets that “Voter initiative lacks the elements that representative democracy provides (for all its faults) to ensure policies and priorities for all its citizens.” In the Pawtucket Times, Jim Baron quotes Robert Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, as saying…
“Democrats are supporting a republican form of government while Republicans are supporting what has been called direct democracy.And at RI Future, the host of the site, in his typically overwrought style, objects that “Voter Initiative undermines democracy at its core.”
“Voter initiative does not work,” Walsh said flatly. Some initiative proposals could be “devastating to public education and other public institutions.”
They’re all wrong, particularly with respect to the Rhode Island version of VI. Here’s why.
The designers of the American constitutional system, believers in limited government that they were, did not create a two-house legislature because they believed that twice as much government to be twice as good. They created two houses to serve two different purposes.
One of the houses was a “Senate” whose members served long terms and were not subject to a popular vote (remember, Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures). This structure was designed to allow Senators to do what was right, even if it was not popular at the time they did it. The hope was that Senators would be drawn from an educated elite and carefully deliberate the needs of the country and the needs of the government when passing laws.
But elites are not angels. The founders understood that the elites would also have their own interests, and might use government to further them at the expense of everyone else (hmmm, sound familiar?). To guard against this possibility, the founders also created a “House of Representatives” with a structure very different from the structure of the Senate. Representatives were directly elected by the people, their terms of office were much shorter, and the whole House had to stand for election during each cycle. The hope here was that the House would be the branch of government that closely mirror and protect the interests of the common people.
For a combination of reasons — an increasing population probably the most important, but also gerrymandering, the increasing complexity of campaign finance laws making it difficult for challengers to get started, and rules that make the House leaders very powerful statewide without being accountable to all of a state’s voters — it hasn’t always worked out out as designed in state legislatures. The “lower” houses of many legislatures have become effectively insulated from the voters, and have become more likely to represent the views of elites and special interests than they are to represent the views of average people.
The final result, in Rhode Island at least, is that instead of having a government composed of a House and a Senate, we’ve ended up with two Senates (ask yourself, is there any difference between your civic relationship with your State Senator and your State Rep?) and, as the design considerations predict, with a legislative process with very limited checks on the power of elite special interests.
All voter initiative does is create a alternative pathway through the government where the interests of the people can be represented without being ignored by self-interested elites who have captured the legislative process. In American-style constitutional democracy, it is not uncommon for a legislative process to have multiple possible paths. Using the Federal government as an example, a bill passed by both houses becomes law with either a Presidential signature OR a 2/3 override vote. A constitutional amendment can be proposed by either both houses of Congress OR a series of conventions called in the states. Voter initiative fits into this tradition; a proposed bill becomes a law through either the legislative process OR through voter initiative.
A slightly better solution might be to have voter initiative be a process by which a bill can become law by bypassing the house, while still requiring Senate (full Senate only, no killing a bill in a single committee allowed) and Gubernatorial approval. But the current voter initiative proposal, where the people can be represented in the initative process, and our dual-chamber Senate can still act on or repeal a passed initiative, is a reasonable step towards restoring some necessary balance to state government. [Open full post]
In today’s Pawtucket Times, Jim Baron reports on the continuing fallout from Matt Brown’s campaign finance problems…
In a ceremony Thursday in the law offices of Republican Attorney General candidate J. William Harsch, state GOP Chairwoman Patricia Morgan signed on to an FEC complaint already filed by the Hawaii Republican Party.Brown continues to assert that the matter is about appearance and not substance…
The complaint charges a “tit for tat” arrangement in which donors who had already contributed the maximum amount allowable under law to the Brown campaign sent donations to Democratic Party organizations in Hawaii, Massachusetts and Maine, and then those party organizations contributed a similar amount to Brown.
Brown, who has campaigned as a reformer and clean government candidate, has since returned the money, insisting that the arrangement was “completely legal” but acknowledging that it presents a “perception problem.”I suspect that Mr. Brown will eventually be vindicated in a legal sense.
Brown campaign spokesman Matt Burgess brushed the complaint off as “just politics. It is Republicans filing complaints against Democrats. It was all completely legal and that’s what the FCC will find.
Asked Thursday if the Brown campaign would do the same thing again, spokesman Matt Burgess said no, but only because it presented a perception problem, not because it was a wrong thing to do.
However, this incident shows how campaign finance “reform” has become a barrier preventing the politically unconnected from entering politics. Mr. Brown has (had?) a legitimate shot at a Senate seat because his career in politics allowed him to develop the nationwide connections needed to set up an elaborate fundraising network capable of delivering small contributions from all over the country. Someone who has not made politics their entire career rarely has that kind of access.
Under the current system, the only people who can raise the money needed to run for statewide office are those who are in a position to spend years building a fundraising network, those with the right connections who are granted access to someone else’s established network, or those who are independently wealthy. To level the playing field between the connected and unconnected, a better solution is to simplify campaign finance regulations but increase transparency and tighten up the rules regarding disclosure.
Finally, a question: Do people think that Matt Brown survives this or not? Since the Democratic primary is basically a beauty contest between two candidates with identical positions on the issues, I don’t see what Mr. Brown can do to differentiate himself from Sheldon Whitehouse and bounce back from this. [Open full post]
I have been clear about my skepticism regarding the Voter Initiative (VI).
Yet, consider these March 30 words from Tom Coyne about the words and actions by people firmly opposed to the VI:
Anybody who doubts that we are in the middle of a war for the future of Rhode Island should have been at the House Judiciary Commitee hearing on Voter Initiative the other night. To say that the disdain of General Assembly Democrats and their supporters was on full display would be a vast understatement. To begin with, they chose a hearing room far too small to accomodate all the VI supporters who came from all over the state to testify at the 4:30 hearing. With most VI supporters forced to cool their heels in the hallway, committee chairman Rep. Don Lally (North Kingstown and Narragansett) proceeded to let opponents of the proposal testify first…
And who was leading the opposition testimony — with a straight face — and waxing eloquent about the evils of the “special interest influence” that Voter Initiative might bring to our innocent Ocean State? None other than Bob Walsh, Marti Rosenberg, and George Nee. If hell has a special place for hypocrites of this high caliber, their reservations are surely confirmed. It was like watching three mafia dons defend their right to run their turf as they saw fit — the taxpayers be damned. Sadly, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Commitee gave every indication that they shared this view — belittling the 21,000 signatures (with accompanying addresses and emails) on the Voter Initiative petition as signifying nothing of consequence. I guess we’ll see about that later this election year…
On the other hand, it was priceless to watch Rep. Amy Rice become apoplectic when Reps. Jim Davey and Larry Ehrhardt decided to aggressively question Walsh, Rosenberg, and Nee’s arguments. “We’ll call the Speaker,” she shreiked.
Of course, it only got better after the first supporters began to testify at 8:30 pm, well after the press had left. All the predictable liberal attack lines were thrown at them — including accusations of being racist, sexist homophobes, and anti-undocumented worker (er, illegal immigrant) to boot. It’s comical to watch — you can set your watch by how long it takes a lefty to demand that any opponent admit to being either an angry racist sexist homophobe or still in denial and in need of more therapy. In their minds, anyone who opposes their views really has only these two choices…
The most colorful part of the evening took place not in the hearing room, but out in the hallway (and in the elevators), where the insults really got personal, and almost came to blows on more than one occasion.
What are we to make of all this? We have three reactions. The first is, of course, to keep this sad spectacle in mind during the fall campaigns for the seats now occupied by the esteemed Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Their disdain and insults should not go unpunished.
The second is to ask a simple question: Rhode Island now has the fourth highest tax burden in the nation, in exchange for which we receive some of its worst performance in public education, social welfare and the condition of our roads and bridges. Honestly, do you think we would be worse off today if we had had Voter Initiative for the past ten years?
Finally, the arrogance and disdain of the General Assembly Democrats, as well as Bob Walsh, Marti Rosenberg and George Nee, all beg one critical question: just what do they think is the end game in Rhode Island? It was Lloyd Monroe who put his finger on this in an acrimonious exchange with Rep. Shanley. “If the voters don’t like it, they can throw me out on my rear end,” Shanley said. Monroe pointed out that the voting had already begun, with more and more people and businesses leaving the state. Remember, Rhode Island and Louisiana are the only two states in the nation facing revenues below rather than above expectations this year. And what hurricane hit us? Decades of failed policies imposed on the state by the Democrat controlled General Assembly, perhaps?
The key point is this: even if Walsh, Rosenberg, and Nee (and their General Assembly lackeys) win this battle, they have lost the war. Their pyrrhic victory will only accelerate the decline of Rhode Island toward an inevitable date with bankruptcy. And as anyone who has looked at our exploding welfare spending and enormous unfunded public sector pension and retiree health care liabilities knows, given our dying private sector economy that day is fast approaching. The brutal truth of the matter is this (listen up teachers and other government employees): if things don’t change soon in Rhode Island, one day your pension check isn’t going to arrive in your mailbox in Florida. If things don’t change, your taxpayer financed Florida (no income tax!) retirement plans are toast. And the longer Bob and Marti and George and the boys and girls on Smith Hill (not to mention Charlie Fogarty and Elizabeth Roberts) keep battling to preserve the current system, the more they will hasten its demise and with it your nasty surprise. If we were in your shoes, we’d be asking our “leaders” a lot more hard questions about just how they think their brilliant strategy is going to keep all those welfare and pension checks coming. Because more performances like the other night are guaranteed to make things worse, not better — and Amy Rice running off to tattle tale to the Speaker can’t change that…
These people are greedy enemies of the public good. Their commitment to continue the failing status quo is why many of us will vote for the VI, even as we have some misgivings about it.
[Open full post]Last week, there was a thoughtful editorial in the North East Independent newspaper, entitled Seniors need tax help, in which the writer argued that the seniors need assistance from the town of East Greenwich and are asking for a tax freeze.
A story in this week’s edition talks about the upcoming April 4 public meeting to discuss the tax freeze for seniors idea in East Greenwich.
Also in this week’s edition is my editorial entitled Freezing taxes for seniors shifts the burden unfairly, which argues that the tax freeze for seniors is bad public policy. One of my key points is that people want relief from high taxes but not enough people are talking about challenging the cause of those high taxes – the public sector union contracts, especially the teachers’ union contract.
A new editorial in the North East Independent says it is time to pay more attention to the school facility issues in East Greenwich. I would challenge one part of the editorial, which says: “It’s a bit ironic, though, because previous school committees deferred maintenance issues to focus on curriculum. It was a decision that left students with a high quality education, but sub-par surroundings. The most recent school committees have found themselves in the unenviable position of having to clean up the costly mess.” Maintenance was deferred, but not because of curriculum. It was deferred because 9-12% annual salary increases, zero co-payments on health insurance until this year, and paying people as much as $7,500/year when they didn’t use the school’s health insurance left no money for curriculum or facility maintenance.
In another typical move, the NEA teachers’ union is being its usual, uncooperative self and won’t consider moving from Blue Cross Blue Shield to United even though there would be savings to the taxpayers from such a change. This after they refused to pay more than 4-6% co-payments on their existing Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance.
(And the uncooperative attitude toward taxpayers gets extended to our children in North Kingstown, where the teachers are now operating under work-to-rule – to the detriment of the children once again – because the School Committee there wants to change insurance carriers for cost reasons.)
Meanwhile, the East Greenwich School Committee continues its longstanding habit of dysfunctional behavior.
School Chair Vincent Bradley offers his editorial viewpoint on the dysfunctionality here.
And the East Greenwich Pendulum summed up its view on the dysfunctionality in an editorial last week.
How ironic that we pay the fourth highest state and local taxes out of the 50 states so we can have the privilege of paying for the demands of outlandishly greedy unions combined with incompetent, dysfunctional public officials.
Simply pathetic – on all fronts.
Peggy Noonan digs in and thinks she’s found what is bothering American’s about immigration:
There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them–economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.
But there’s another thing. And it’s not fear about “them.” It’s anxiety about us.
It’s the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don’t do that, you’ll lose it all. . . .Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they’re joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?
Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don’t want to be impolite. We don’t want to offend. We don’t want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.
And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don’t have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won’t long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.
Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they’ve joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It’s a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.
She continues by calling for a more positive teaching of U.S. history. I’ve got some thoughts on that too.
[Open full post]Don Boudreaux guides us to a thoroughly enjoyable article entitled The Secret of George Mason: What its Final Four basketball team and its unusual economics department have in common.
[Open full post]Here’s the New York Times on yesterday’s NSA wiretap hearing…
In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps.
Here’s the Washington Times, on the same hearing, same subject…
A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).Senator Specter, could you please post the actual hearing testimony on the Senate Judiciary Committee website so the American people can learn what was really said? [Open full post]
The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president’s constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order…
The judges, however, said Mr. Bush’s choice to ignore established law regarding foreign intelligence gathering was made “at his own peril,” because ultimately he will have to answer to Congress and the Supreme Court if the surveillance was found not to be in the best interests of national security.
Charles Krauthammer has written an important editorial entitled Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World: What’s at stake in the dispute over Iranian nukes? Ultimately, human survival in which he says:
Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. “I would see people building a bridge,” he wrote. “And I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.”
Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman’s pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin’s Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either…
But that’s the point. We’re now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.
We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran’s newest rulers. Then again, we don’t understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs…who…embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.
This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new–medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects–but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.
That is why Iran’s arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi’ism’s version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away…He believes that the Islamic revolution’s raison d’etre is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?
Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.
That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman’s vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism…
Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps–referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.
Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we’ve had nukes for exactly 61. No one knows the precise prospects for human extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate odds…
Michael Leeden has more, with even more editorials on Iran spread throughout his archive.
These are not nice people.
Last week, the Providence Journal, Pawtucket Times, Westerly Sun, and Newport Daily News (story links) all reported on a recent evaluation of the quality of education in Rhode Island conducted in the form of the New England Common Assessment Program. Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo summarizes the results…
Statewide, about half of the 72,000 third-through eighth-grade students tested last fall were proficient in math and about 60 percent were proficient in reading. Fifth and eighth graders also took a writing test; 51 percent were proficient.
But in the urban districts — Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket — just 28 percent of students were proficient in math; 35 percent in reading; and 33 percent in writing.
Results from Cranston, East Providence, Johnston, Newport, North Providence, Warwick and West Warwick, so-called urban-ring communities, were far higher; 50 percent in math; 62 percent in reading; and 55 percent in writing.
And students in suburban and rural communities scored the highest rates: 65 percent in math; 72 percent in reading; and 61 percent in writing.
The political direction where this is heading is foreshadowed in Douglas Hadden‘s Pawtucket Times story on reaction from Pawtucket…
“I would bet the urban districts are performing quite a bit” below non-urban school systems. “That wouldn’t come as a surprise really,” said School Committee Chairman Alan Tenreiro, who teaches at Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket. “Socio-economics is one of the biggest indicators, besides the educator in the classroom, for student achievement….
Tenreiro state the urban core results showed the need for more state financial support.
“I think we have to look at the education funding formula and make one that’s adequate and equitable for all students. I’m not saying money is the whole answer, but we do have to provide a lot of support services to kids that walk in the doorway.”
Making education funding “adequate and equitable” is code for raising taxes and/or cutting services in non-urban communities so that their resources can be transferred to the failing urban school districts that already receive a disproportionate share of state aid. Mr. Tenreiro’s remarks exhibit the distressing tendency of urban officials to demand that everyone give the cities what the cities want, based on the belief that urban problems are more important than everyone else’s, and that smaller communities will always have enough for dealing with their piddling little small-town problems from whatever is leftover.
Unfortunately, like government bureaus everywhere, urban school districts tend to lose their focus and view increasing their budgets as an end to itself. Before demanding that they be provided with even larger subsidies, urban school districts have a responsibility to show that they have meaningfully considered all available options for improving the quality of education available to their students — even options that foster educational improvement without increasing the amount of money under traditional bureaucratic control — including school choice, charter schools, and — dare it be said — voucher systems.
Another day, another letter to the ProJo on Voter Initiative, but this time arguing in favor. Joseph H. Weaver’s argument echoes that given here and elsewhere, but he brought up two interesting points that warrant attention. Weaver believes that the two issues at the heart of the debate are “the role of special interests and the voters’ competence to handle the situation.” Concerning the competence issue, Weaver writes:
Overall, I think everyone, except our state legislators, believes Rhode Island voters can handle the responsibilities of voter initiative. It is interesting that on the issue of a casino, the legislature wants to place the issue before the voters, just as a voter initiative would place an issue before the voters. Either we are competent or we are not: Which is it, Legislators?
I’d also add that many legislators probably think the voters showed great judgement in sending them to public office! As for the special interest argument, Weaver makes the pithy point that:
And here we have to listen to our legislators with awed respect, because if anyone knows about selling out to the special interests, they do. Harrah’s, CVS . . . the list is endless.
Will special interests have a role to play in a voter initiative? Perhaps. Can the voters do a worse job of controlling the special interests than have our legislators? Of course not. Actually, can anyone do a worse job than they do? I don’t think so.
Finally, Weaver points out that Voter Initiative is really nothing more than a fallback to the historical precedent of the New England town meeting. As he correctly notes, the town meeting form of government became untenable “[w]hen populations and distances became too great” and the modern form of representative government developed. With technological advance, both the hurdles of counting the votes of a large population and overcoming the travelling distance to the seat of state government have been removed. Finally, I do find it a bit ironic that a conservative such as myself–who still favors the electoral college, for instance–would be all for putting more direct power into the hands of the people. The republican form of government is the very root of our political system, after all. But sometimes contemporary necessity dictates that we let go the ideal.
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