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Too Much Democracy?
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11315 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,589 Words |
| Author
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Harold Johnson
Harold Johnson is an editorial writer at the Orange County
Register in Santa Ana, California. |
Hiram Johnson had a bone to pick with James Madison. Or, more precisely, with the Madisonian notion, enshrined in the Constitution, that representative government trumps direct democracy as an engine of progress and guarantor of rights.
Johnson was the Progressive Era governor of California whose legacy was the initiative and other forms of populist decision making. The railroad barons and other moneyed interests that impeded the general will were to be brought to heel by the people themselves, acting, when necessary, as a superlegislature that could override confused or corrupt lawmakers in Sacramento.
But this system, designed to give the average citizen, in extraordinary circumstances, more of a voice over his destiny, always contained the seeds of something more volatile. Eighty years after its introduction, the initiative has been transmuted into an instrument for micromanaging every aspect of government in California. A staggering array of proposed laws--addressing issues ranging from pesticides to dolphin nets to snack taxes to euthanasia--have been put up for plebiscite in recent years, giving rise to a big-money industry of referenda hawkers and often reducing elected legislators to nothing more than interested onlookers in the policy-making process.
Even the staunchest defenders of the initiative acknowledge the potentially toxic side effects. Former Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, for one, decries the malign effect of "ballot-box budgeting." A patchwork of measures endorsed by voters have carved out chunks of state revenue for exclusive use by the public school establishment or other special interests, making budget balancing a growing migraine for the governor and legislature.
OUT OF CONTROL
In the 55 years after 1922, there was never a year in which more than 10 initiatives qualified for the ballot and never a decade in which more than nine initiatives passed. But the dam broke in the late seventies, and the flood has run at full force ever since so that, over the course of 1990 alone, voters were confronted with more than 50 initiatives and bond issues that required ballot handbooks of Tolstoyan length.
Madison would be aghast--but so, one suspects, would Hiram Johnson.
Modern initiative entrepreneurs have honed the direct mail pitch and
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