Why Limit Access to Initiative Process?

Ward Connerly has taken his campaign against affirmative action to Florida and found himself up against a foe he and other initiative proponents never faced in California--at least not yet.

Connerly’s series of Florida initiatives to remove discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity and national origin in education, employment and contracting will come before the Florida Supreme Court, which wields a sharp single-subject ax to cut down initiative proposals before they get to the ballot.

Many states, including California, have a constitutional requirement to limit initiatives to a single subject. Its purpose is to present voters with clear proposals. However, because not all reforms are simple, an initiative dealing with one subject may contain numerous components.

How single-subject is defined varies from state to state. For example, in 1994, the Florida Supreme Court took an initiative off the ballot that proposed to limit fees and taxes, which the court declared was two subjects. Two years later, without interference by the California courts, voters here passed Proposition 218, put-ting limits on both fees and taxes.

The California Supreme Court has liberally interpreted this state’s single-subject requirement. It has declared that the various parts of the initiative must be reasonably germane to the purpose of the measure. Now the California court has heard a preelection challenge based on the single-subject rule concerning Proposition 24, which qualified for the March primary ballot.

The question, which makes many initiative proponents nervous, is: Will the court use this case to reexamine its past decisions on the single-subject rule and cut back on the broad definition currently in force?

Initiative opponents hope so. Initiative foes are eager for the possibility of limiting the power and influence of initiatives. For some critics, initiatives cheat the deliberative processes of government. For others, including many elected officials and bureaucrats, initiatives are vampires sucking away their power.

Yet, as recent surveys conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Field Poll have shown, the initiative process is still revered by California voters.

Proposition 24 is made up of two components. One would turn over the legislative task of reapportionment--the once-in-a-decade exercise of drawing political boundaries--to the state Supreme Court. The second would cut the salaries of the state’s representatives.

One subject? Advocates for the measure think so. Their lawyers argued that the single subject was conflict of interest by the Legislature in dealing with reapportionment and compensation or the subject also could be viewed as terms and conditions of legislators’ employment.

Not all the justices seemed convinced by these arguments; however, the reasoning may be enough to satisfy the law. As Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar suggested, it was incumbent upon the court to find a relationship between all sections of an initiative, “if we can.”

But Werdegar also asked the crucial question: Is now the time to reexamine the court’s past jurisprudence and tighten the definition of the single-subject clause? The court must clearly be aware that such tightening could lead to strangulation of the people’s initiative right.

Look again to Florida. The Supreme Court there is being urged by the state’s attorney general to throw out Connerly’s initiatives because the single-subject rule is violated in a number of ways. Connerly’s measures apply to both local government and state government. Two subjects, says the attorney general. And, it prohibits special treatment based on race, sex and national origin. More than two subjects, says the state’s top lawyer.

With this calculated reasoning based on a tortured definition of single-subject, the people of Florida may be denied the opportunity to express themselves on an important issue.

Depriving the public of “one of the most precious rights of our democratic process”--a phrase once turned by the California Supreme Court itself--must not happen here. If the court decides it must rule on the validity of Proposition 24 now, something it could put off until after the election, it should do so without redrawing single-subject lines.

Article II of California’s Constitution dealing with the initiative process affirms that all political power is inherent in the people. It goes on to say that the people may reform government when the public good may require it. A fairly and broadly applied initiative process guarantees this right.