RE: Initiative Process

[ken diamond <kenken5001@yahoo.com>]

Taylor asked about supporters of choice 2, "What is it that they are trying to accomplish? Stated another way, what is important to them?"

This is not just a question for supporters of this choice. To design the rules of the process, it's necessary to have a vision of what it is intended to achieve. What are the principals and values we want to incorporate into our collective decision-making? What voices get heard and why? How should we or our representatives come to decide the laws and regulations that will govern us? These choices have real consequences usually entailing winners and losers in the distribution or re-distribution of resources and rights.

The "Federalist Papers" is a good source on the thinking and questions the country's founders considered when they were first establishing the rules of the country. But reading them, you can see they were no utopians. They were trying to put checks and balances on the dangerous impulses they felt inherent in people. 

David Broder in "Democracy Derailed" cites our founders when arguing against the use of initiatives. But I see it as another possible check against human failings within systems. The initiative was born out of the era of progressive reforms as a way to bypass legislatures beholden to powerful groups. I am well aware of how the system has evolved. But it does occasionally do something like it was intended to do if not nearly enough for my liking. And though special interest groups have learned to exploit it, I, along most people in states with an initiative process don't want to see it go. That's because the alternative is leaving power solely to politicians who are widely and, in my opinion, justifiably distrusted. Like I've written earlier, I would like to see the initiative process reformed, only not by politicians who oppose it because it undermines their power.