The People’s Initiatives Are Under Heavy Assault : Legislature: Lawmakers, stung by term limits, consider various curbs on popularly generated propositions.

William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States, said of the initiative process: “Could any system be devised (that is) better adapted to the exaltation of cranks?”

Apparently, many California legislators share Taft’s disdain for this tool of direct democracy. Since last November, when 28 propositions appeared on the ballot, state lawmakers have introduced a torrent of bills to “reform” the initiative process.

Some bills would make it harder, if not impossible, to collect enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot--as if the task of collecting 1 million signatures to amend the state Constitution was not already difficult enough for citizens.

Others would allow initiatives to take effect only if a majority of all registered voters in the state actually went to the polls and voted for the proposition. (How many of our current legislators would be in Sacramento right now if we applied the same voting requirement to them?)

Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) is pushing a bill that would do away with the “severability clause.” This clause, which is added to most initiatives, declares that if one portion of the law is invalidated by the courts, it will be severed from the remainder of the law, which will remain in force. Roberti wants the whole law thrown out if one sentence is found wanting.

Roberti would apply this all-or-nothing standard only to laws that come from citizens’ initiatives, not to laws written in the Legislature. Indeed, Roberti himself recently acknowledged that some provisions of a law that he co-authored, the ban on assault rifles, are technically flawed and require correction. If he were operating under the restraints he wants initiative writers to work under, the assault-rifle ban would be stricken from the books in its entirety.

To justify this assault on the initiative process, the politicians say that the public is fed up with the number and complexity of the initiatives on the ballot in recent years. They claim to be worried that “special interests” exercise too much control over initiatives.

Wrong!

Legislators love the initiative process when it serves their own purposes. Of the 28 measures on the ballot last November, 22 were sponsored by legislators or elected officials. And we didn’t hear lawmakers grumbling about the process when they placed a measure on the June, 1990, ballot that contained a hidden mechanism for increasing their salaries.

What the public is truly fed up with is its elected officials who spend so much time catering to special interests that important legislation cannot be passed, making it necessary for citizens to resort to the initiative process.

Public anger against an impotent Legislature clearly propelled the passage of Proposition 140, which limited the terms of state officials. If anything, the real force behind efforts to limit the initiative process is the vindictive desire of present lawmakers to punish voters for limiting their political careers, and to prevent future outbursts of voter democracy like Proposition 140.

Self-serving attempts to restrict the initiative process are not new. A decade after the process was instituted, Gov. Hiram Johnson and his fellow California Progressives banded together in an organization called the League to Protect the Initiative to fight off efforts to restrict use of ballot propositions. The anti-initiative forces wanted to nearly double the number of signatures required to place tax matters on the ballot, from 8% of those who voted in the last election to 15%. Public pressure sank the proposal.

The initiative process should be improved--but to expand, rather than restrict, the tools of citizen democracy.

For example, “advisory” and “indirect” initiative systems would give the people the chance to express grievances while inviting the Legislature to participate in the initiative process. An “advisory” initiative would operate much like a legislative resolution, allowing the will of the people to be expressed at the polls without making a law. A strong expression from the voters hopefully would prompt the Legislature to act. An “indirect” initiative process would allow the Legislature to hold hearings on a proposed initiative and suggest changes before the law went to the ballot.

However, such reforms should not be viewed as substitutes for the direct initiative system. The people must retain the power to bypass a recalcitrant Legislature with the right to make their own laws.

In this age of electronic advertising and impersonal politics, the initiative process is as close as we can get to an old-fashioned town meeting. The people gather in their voting halls after a period of debate and express their feelings about what their fellow citizens have proposed. The tradition is a long and trusted one. And it works.

No initiative is perfect; nor are the voters infallible. Rather than espouse the cynicism of President Taft, legislators should heed the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson: “The good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.”