Thursday, June 14, 2007
Exil Ent
I'm bored, so let's talk about the initiative process. In Massachusetts, in order for a citizen initiative to make the ballot, it also needs the support of a quarter of the legislature for two sessions (as opposed to California, where a bunch of signatures is sufficient). Blah blah gay marriage blah. What do you think about this process?
The two-session requirement seems a bit odd to me. While there are issues which should require the approval of more than one session to give voters a chance to smash legislators, initiatives don't seem to be one of them. After all, it's not like voters need a chance to stop the legislators through the reelection process for an initiative when they can just vote against the initiative directly. I'm not sure about the actual rationale for that policy, and I'm not sure where I could go to find it, so I'll just leave it alone for now.
More interesting is the idea of requiring some legislative approval. This can help prevent, say, wealthy folks bypassing the legislature completely through sheer resources, putting measures on the ballot that don't really have the popular support to justify their presence and cost to the voters.
On the other hand, though, these are constitutional amendments, which means they may include issues about how the legislature itself is built. While for an issue like gay marriage, this isn't a big deal, there are many things which probably need to be kept completely separate from the legislature. Issues like term limits, or redistricting, or other policies that directly limit the power of the legislature shouldn't require any amount of legislative approval. On gay marriage, you can just vote out the gay marriage supporters and vote in opponents and then go from there, but for legislative power, even if you vote out the folks who don't want to give it up for "reformers," those reformers will be legislators holding that power by the time the issue comes to them.
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