Dangerous
Initiatives: A Snake in the Grass Roots
By David S. Broder
Sunday, March 26,
2000; Page B01
Washington Post
An alternative form of government—the ballot
initiative—is spreading in the United States. Despite its popular appeal and
reformist roots, this method of lawmaking is alien to the spirit of the
Constitution and its carefully crafted set of checks and balances. Left
unchecked, the initiative could challenge or even subvert the system that has
served the nation so well for more than 200 years.
Though derived from a century-old idea favored by the
Populist and Progressive movements as a weapon against special-interest
influence, the initiative has become a favored tool of interest groups and
millionaires with their own political and personal agendas. These
players—often not even residents of the states whose laws and constitutions
they seek to rewrite—have learned that the initiative is a more efficient way
of achieving their ends than the cumbersome and often time-consuming process of
supporting candidates for public office and then lobbying them to pass
legislation.
In hundreds of municipalities and half the
states—particularly in the West—the initiative has become a rival force to
City Hall and the State House. (The District of Columbia allows voters to enact
laws by initiative, but the states of Maryland and Virginia do not.) In a single
year, 1998, voters across the country bypassed their elected representatives to
end affirmative action, raise the minimum wage, ban billboards, permit patients
to obtain prescriptions for marijuana, restrict campaign spending and
contributions, expand casino gambling, outlaw many forms of hunting, prohibit
some abortions and allow adopted children to obtain the names of their
biological parents. Of 66 statewide initiatives that year, 39 became law. Simply
put, the initiative’s growing popularity has given us something that once
seemed unthinkable—not a government of laws, but laws without government.
This new fondness for the initiative—at least in the
portion of the country where it has become part of the political fabric—is
itself evidence of the increasing alienation of Americans from our system of
representative government. Americans have always had a healthy skepticism about
the people in public office: The writers of the Constitution began with the
assumption that power is a dangerous intoxicant and that those who wield it must
be checked by clear delineation of their authority.
But what we have today goes well beyond skepticism. In
nearly every state I visited while researching this phenomenon, the initiative
was viewed as sacrosanct, and the legislature was held in disrepute. One
expression of that disdain is the term-limits movement, which swept the country
in the past two decades, usually by the mechanism of initiative campaigns.
It is the clearest expression of the revolt against
representative government. In effect, it is a command: “Clear out of there,
you bums. None of you is worth saving. We’ll take over the job of writing the
laws ourselves.” But who is the “we”? Based on my reporting, it is clear
that the initiative process has largely discarded its grass-roots origins. It is
no longer merely the province of idealistic volunteers who gather signatures to
place legislation of their own devising on the ballot. Billionaire Paul Allen,
co-founder of Microsoft, spent more than $8 million in support of a referendum
on a new football stadium for the Seattle Seahawks. Allen, who was negotiating
to buy the team, even paid the $4 million cost of running the June 1997 special
election—in which Washington state voters narrowly agreed to provide public
financing for part of the $425 million stadium bill.
Like so many other aspects of American politics, the
initiative process has become big business. Lawyers, campaign consultants and
signature-gathering firms see each election cycle as an opportunity to make
money on initiatives that, in many cases, only a handful of people are pushing.
Records from the 1998 election cycle—not even one of the busiest in
recent years—show that more than $250 million was raised and spent in this
largely uncontrolled and unexamined arena of politics.
This is a far cry from the dream of direct democracy
cherished by the 19th-century reformers who imported the initiative
concept from Switzerland in the hope that it might cleanse the corrupt politics
of their day. They would be the first to throw up their hands in disgust at what
their noble experiment has produced.
The founders of the American republic were almost as
distrustful of pure democracy as they were resentful of royal decrees. Direct
democracy might work in a small, compact society, they argued, but it would be
impractical in a nation the size of the United States. At the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, no voice was raised in support of direct democracy.
A century later, with the rise of industrial America and
rampant corruption in the nation’s legislatures, political reformers began to
question the work of the founders. Largely rural protest groups from the
Midwest, South and West came together at the first convention of the Populist
Party, in Omaha in 1892. The Populists denounced both Republicans and Democrats
as corrupt accomplices of the railroad barons, the banks that set ruinous
interest rates, and the industrial magnates and monopolists who profited from
the labor of others while paying meager wages.
Both the Populists and Progressives—a middle-class
reform movement bent on rooting out dishonesty in government—saw the
initiative process as a salve for the body politic’s wounds. An influential
pamphlet, “Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and
Referendum,” appeared in 1893. In it, J.W. Sullivan argued that as citizens
took on the responsibility of writing the laws themselves, “each would
consequently acquire education in his role and develop a lively interest in the
public affairs in part under his own management.”
Into this feisty mix of reformers came William Simon
U’Ren, a central figure in the history of the American initiative process. In
the 1880s, U’Ren apprenticed himself to a lawyer in Denver and became active
in politics. He later told Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, that he
was appalled when the Republican bosses of Denver gave him what we would now
call “street money” to buy votes. In
the 1890s, having moved to Oregon in search of a healthier climate, U’Ren
helped form the Direct Legislation League. He launched a propaganda campaign,
distributing almost half a million pamphlets and hundreds of copies of
Sullivan’s book in support of a constitutional convention that would enshrine
initiative and referendum in Oregon’s charter. The proposal failed narrowly in
the 1895 session of the legislature, in part because the Portland Oregonian
labeled it “one of the craziest of all the crazy fads of Populism” and “a
theory of fiddlesticks borrowed from a petty foreign state.”
Eventually, U’Ren lined up enough support for a
constitutional amendment to pass easily in 1899. It received the required second
endorsement from the legislature two years later, with only one dissenting vote.
The voters overwhelmingly ratified the amendment in 1902 and it withstood a
legal challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
U’Ren’s handiwork is evident today in his adopted
state. The official voters’ pamphlet for the 1996 Oregon ballot—containing
explanations for 16 citizen-sponsored initiatives and six others referred by the
legislature—ran 248 pages.
It also included paid ads from supporters and opponents.
Money does not always prevail in modern-day initiative
fights, but it is almost always a major—even a dominant—factor. In the fall
of 1997, more than 200 petitions were circulating for statewide initiatives that
sponsors hoped to place on ballots the following year. The vast majority did not
make it. The single obstacle that eliminated most of them was the ready cash
needed to hire the companies that wage initiative campaigns. In 1998, the most
expensive initiative campaign was the battle over a measure legalizing
casino-style gambling on Indian lands in California. The Nevada casinos, fearful
of the competition, shelled out $25,756,828 trying
to defeat the proposition. The tribes outdid them, spending $66,257,088
to win. The $92 million total was a new record for California.
But of all the ventures into initiative politics that
year, perhaps the most successful was engineered by three wealthy men who shared
the conviction that the federal “war on drugs” was a dreadful mistake. They
banded together to support medical marijuana initiatives in five Western states.
The best known of them was billionaire financier George Soros of New York, who
had made his fortune in currency trading. He and his political
partners—Phoenix businessman John Sperling and Cleveland businessman Peter B.
Lewis—personally contributed more than 75 percent of the $1.5 million spent on
behalf of a successful medical marijuana initiative in just one of the states,
Arizona. The issue isn’t whether medical marijuana laws are good or bad. As
Arizona state Rep. Mike Gardner complained to me, “The initiative was part of
our constitution when we became a state, because it was supposed to offer people
a way of overriding special interest groups. But it’s turned 180 degrees, and
now the special interest groups use the initiative for their own purposes. Why
should a New York millionaire be writing the laws of Arizona?”
When I relayed Gardner’s question to Soros, he replied:
“I live in one place, but I consider myself a citizen of the world. I have
foundations in 30 countries, and I believe certain universal principles apply
everywhere—including Arizona.”
It won’t be long before the twin forces of technology
and public opinion coalesce in a political movement for a national
initiative—allowing the public to substitute the simplicity of majority rule
for what must seem to many Americans the arcane, out-of-date model of the
Constitution. In fact, such a debate is already underway, based on what I heard
at a May 1999 forum sponsored by the Initiative and Referendum Institute here in
Washington.
M. Dane Waters, the institute’s president, cut his
political teeth on the term-limits movement, and the group’s membership
includes firms in the initiative industry. But Waters strove to keep the forum
intellectually honest, inviting critics as well as supporters of the initiative
process. There was no doubt about
the leanings of most of those in attendance. The keynote speaker was Kirk
Fordice, then governor of Mississippi, who was cheered when he saluted the
audience as “the greatest collection of mavericks in the world. The goal that
unites us is to return a portion of the considerable power of government to
individual citizens . . . and take control from the hands of professional
politicians and bureaucrats.” Fordice, a Republican, noted that his state was
the most recent to adopt the initiative, in 1992. Since then, he lamented,
“only one initiative has made it onto the ballot,” a term-limits measure
that voters rejected. “Thank God
for California and those raggedy-looking California kids who came in and
gathered the signatures,” he said. “Now the [Mississippi] legislature is
trying to say we can’t have them come in, and we’re taking it to court.”
Then came Mike Gravel, former Democratic senator from
Alaska and head of an organization called Philadelphia II, which calls for
essentially creating a new Constitution based on direct democracy. Gravel’s
plan—simplicity itself—is to take a national poll, and if 50 percent of the
people want to vote on an issue, it goes on the next general election ballot.
Then Congress would have to hold hearings on the issue and mark up a bill for
submission to the voters. Once an issue gets on the ballot, only individuals
could contribute to the campaign for passing or defeating it.
When I began researching the initiative process, I was agnostic about it.
But now that I’ve heard the arguments and seen the initiative industry
in action, the choice is easy. I would choose James Madison and the
Constitution’s checks and balances over the seductive simplicity of Gravel’s
up-or-down initiative vote. We should be able to learn from experience, and our
experience with direct democracy during the last two decades is that wealthy
individuals and special interests—the very targets of the Populists and
Progressives a century ago—have learned all too well how to subvert the
initiative process to their own purposes. Admittedly, representative government
has acquired a dubious reputation today. But as citizens, the remedy isn’t to
avoid our elected representatives. The best weapon against the ineffective, the
weak and the corrupt is in our hands each Election Day.
Ben White, The Post’s political researcher, assisted
David Broder in the research for his book on the initiative process.
David Broder is The Washington Post’s senior political
writer. This article is adapted from his new book, “Democracy Derailed:
Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money” (Harcourt).
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