Response to Seattle Post 3-27-00 column

Rich crusaders are running initiative process by Joel Connelly

jolconnelly@seattle-pl.com

From Dwayne Hunn, attila@excelonline.com,   5-9-00

 

“’A Republic, if you can keep it,’ Franklin replied.  The challenge of his last five words, Broder writes, ‘is no longer just a theoretical test question,’” is the ending to Joel Connelly’s March 27 piece, “Rich crusaders are running initiative process.”  Broder’s book, Democracy Derailed:  Initiative campaigns and the Power of Money, knocks the 24 state empowered initiative process and the budding National Initiative Movement, dubbed Philadelphia II.

Proponents of the initiative process believe that, far from threatening our democracy, the initiative reverberates directly from the heart of the Founding Fathers and into the Constitution.  From that Americans have enabled an amalgam many of us casually refer to as a “republic” or “democracy” or  “representative government.”  From there America’s maverick and demanding character keeps growing by interpreting its heritage as it thinks the Fathers would have – by continuing to give people choices, freedoms and responsibilities over strictures or formal titles.  

Broder interprets Franklin as siding with him.  Yet Chief Justice James Wilson, like Franklin one of just six men to sign both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, reflects Broder’s money and power concerns while strongly supporting the people’s ‘collective’ initiative rights.

“There are three simple species of government—monarchy, where the supreme power is in a single person—aristocracy, where the supreme power is in a select assembly, the members of which either fill up, by election, the vacancies in their own body, or succeed to their places in its by inheritance, property, or in respect of some personal right or qualification—a republick [sic] or democracy, where the people at large retain the supreme power, and act either collectively or by representation.”[1]

Through much of the 1970’s about 50 volunteers learned about the initiative and Constitutional process from an ex-used car salesman who founded Peoples Lobby. He taught us how to responsibly “act … collectively” in the Founding Father’s tradition.  The Lobby led campaigns to clean the environment, the campaign that established California’s first Campaign Reform Law and Fair Political Practice Commission, the 16-state Western Bloc Nuclear Moratorium Campaign, the cross-country bus trip that culminated with the one and only 1977 Senate Judiciary Hearings on establishing a national initiative process, and became a nationwide training center for groups wanting to learn how to directly affect government.  In large part, and briefly mentioned in Broder’s book, the revival of the initiative is owed to the work of Ed and Joyce Koupal’s Peoples Lobby.  The Lobby’s trainings influenced the spectrum from Howard Jarvis, the loved or hated Tax Crusader of California’s Proposition 13, to Ralph Nader and his Raiders and thousands in between.

 As for money, the Lobby earned it the old fashioned, Franklin way – doing commercial and political printing on second-hand presses in a ramshackle garage behind the Koupal’s home/Lobby office.  Today it is harder to run old-fashioned campaigns.  Money seems to be everywhere.  Why then wouldn’t smart, rich entrepreneurs make their money play a role in the initiative process?  At least now, thanks to campaign reform initiatives, what they spend is fully disclosed.  Money backed initiative campaigns can’t use a legislator’s back door to get benefits hidden under a maze of laws and regulations. 

For lightly financed citizen groups, is it that difficult to pass an initiative against moneyed opposition and to defeat a proposed money-backed initiative? Public Policy Institute of California research on the 106 California statewide initiatives run from 1976-1996 showed: Citizen groups were able to pass 60% of their supported initiatives, while moneyed groups passed only 22%.  Fifty-eight percent of the measures opposed by economic groups failed to pass, while 59% of those opposed by citizen groups failed.

 In our frenetic, media-drenched, techno-blitzed lives, learning about another initiative is another frantic pain.  Yet many voters spend more time learning about their initiatives than our reps do on the tons of laws and regulations they pass each year.

The states initiative process hasn’t supplanted representative government.  But how many could argue that its results ---  abolition of poll taxes, aid to weak and indigent, bottle deposit bills, campaign finance reform, direct election of US Senators, direct primaries, food sales tax exemptions, civil servant merit systems, minimum wages, mining reclamation, old age pensions, open meetings, nuclear waste disposal prohibition, public school funding, tax limits, term limits, victim rights, women's suffrage, workman's compensation, -- haven’t improved our Republic?  The Direct Democracy national initiative process that bothers Broder is the vibrant pulse emanating from the Constitution’s heart.  It’s telling us what the Lobby’s motto said, “Final responsibility rests with the people.  Therefore never is final authority delegated.” 

 

Dwayne Hunn worked as a volunteer for Peoples Lobby and is presently a board member.  Philadelphia II’s Direct Democracy Initiative can be reached at www.peopleslobby.net

Dwayne Hunn, attila@excelonline.com