It’s the explanation regularly
offered by lawmakers for the numerous draft bills they’re
sending to each other that would hobble and obstruct the
100-year-old initiative and referendum process in Nevada. And
that's a process that the Nevada business community may well
need, if it is going to protect itself from recent and future
tax increases.
Right now, lawmakers are only adding
fuel to the political fire—demonstrating not only that they’re
out of touch and not only that they don’t want to listen to
voters, but that a good number of them actually want to gag
voters—by effectively ending Nevadans’ right of petition and
redress.
Paradoxically, it was this kind of
recalcitrance among careerist California lawmakers that led
that state’s voters to give up on the union-dominated
California Legislature and seek reform through the initiative
and referendum process.
Proposition 13 is a perfect example.
For the better part of 10 years, Golden state taxpayers had
pled with state and local governments for relief and reform.
But government at each level had become the wholly owned
property of government-employee unions. Thus, after years and
years of dithering and political fakery, California taxpayers
finally had had enough. First they passed Prop 13, and then,
at the next general election, they passed the Jarvis-Gann
initiative, which imposed important constitutional spending
controls on state lawmakers.
All the while, of course, the
California political class was crying gloom, doom and
catastrophe. What the historical record shows, however, is
that the Jarvis-Gann constraints—until breached by subterfuge
in the early 1990s—laid the groundwork for over a decade of
sound finance and economic progress for the state of
California.
Here in Nevada, voters face an
increasingly similar situation, in the form of a runaway
legislative majority. In 2003, despite overwhelming opposition
in the polls, and despite a massive outcry of protest from
Nevada voters coming in to the Legislature over phone, fax and
e-mail lines, the 2003 Legislature chose to shove massive and
completely unneeded tax increases down the throats of Nevada
business people and working folks.
This session, the same callous klatch
of careerist Nevada pols did it again. Notwithstanding the
record windfall of both sales and property tax revenues
overflowing state and local treasuries, they took advantage of
the tax-burden crisis facing homeowners to introduce and
impose a discriminatory and unconstitutional split-role
property tax on Nevada businesses.
Now, like pirates who take up the
gangplank after they’ve rushed aboard and hijacked a ship,
some of these too-long-in-the-legislature types are out to
effectively disenfranchise their fellow citizens before
redress can be accomplished through the initiative process.
While some of the bills seek to make initiatives and ballot
questions easier for voters to understand, a surprisingly
large number are clearly designed to seriously sabotage the
right of petition in Nevada—a state with some of the nation’s
highest hurdles already.
For example, Las Vegas Assemblywoman
Chris Giunchigliani is not only working to get voter-imposed
term limits repealed (See this week's NPRI commentary, “High Anxiety”), but
she has introduced two different proposed constitutional
amendments to make it harder for voters to circulate and
qualify petitions—Assembly Joint Resolution 5 and Assembly
Bill 497.
AJR 5 would double the number of
voters required to qualify a constitutional amendment
question, raising it from the current 10 percent of the last
election’s turnout to 20 percent. A similar provision would
require 15 percent of the last election’s turnout to place a
statute-change measure on the ballot.
No ballot measure has ever been
qualified for the ballot in Nevada with the level of numbers
that Giunchigliani would require. Only extremely wealthy
groups and individuals would have a chance.
Giunchigliani also proposes a rule
where, if petition-originating ballot measure fails in the
general election by 55 percent, no “substantially similar”
measure—as determined, no doubt, by an expensive legal
fight—could be on the next general election ballot.
“That seems like a very odd
prohibition,” said Lucille Lusk of the grassroots organization
Nevada Concerned Citizens, to lawmakers yesterday. “If a
candidate ran for office and lost by 55 percent, would we say
that candidate can’t run the next time?”
Observed Lusk, testifying before the
Senate Legislative Operations and Elections Committee: “There
are some very significant free speech and right-to-petition
your government issues here.”
In Assembly Bill 497, Giunchigliani
seeks to raise other hurdles to petitioners. Currently Nevada
law says that “Any five registered voters of the county may
commence initiative or referendum proceedings by filing with
the county clerk an affidavit stating they will constitute the
petitioners’ committee and be responsible for circulating the
petition and filing it in proper form…” Giunchigliani would
double that condition, requiring 10.
“What if that county’s Esmeralda?
What if that county’s Eureka?” asked Eagle Forum’s Janine
Hansen, before the Senate committee. “Maybe they can’t come up
with 10 people. No, it’s hard enough in a major county to come
up with 10 people who are willing to put their names on the
line to go forward on a petition.”
According to University of Southern
California professor John Matsusaka, most legislative
initiative “reform” efforts “are intended to limit
initiatives. That’s because legislators don’t like people
making the decisions. They don’t like the initiative process,
so they tend to limit it.”
Matsusaka is president of USC’s
Initiative & Referendum Institute. He says “the reason
initiatives have gained popularity since the mid-1990s has to
do with the increased amount of information voters can access
about government through the Internet, cable television and
satellite connections.
“People aren’t happy with their
legislatures, and they’re exposed to more information,”
Matsusaka said. “They know more about what is going on.
“Fifty years ago a regular person
didn’t know what government did. Today a lot of people say
they know as much as the lawmakers, especially when it comes
to broad issues like the minimum wage. So people are now
saying, ‘Let us decide on the laws.’”
Former state senator Helen Foley is
an example. She represents a coalition of health care
organizations, including the Clark County Health District,
that supports a proposed 2006 initiative—the Nevada Clean
Indoor Air Act—that would prohibit smoking in most public
places.
“This initiative comes from
frustration with the Legislature,” says Foley. “The
Legislature has dealt with second-hand smoke for more than a
decade but we still have among the laxest laws on second-hand
smoke in the nation. We still have smoking in grocery stores
and restaurants and convenience stores.”
