Citizens in Charge

While state legislators and special interests continue to call for restrictions on what they call a flawed citizen initiative system, yet another report has come out indicating that California’s budget woes are the fault of the legislature, not the voters and the initiative process. The nonpartisan Center for Governmental Studies has found in a preliminary report that legislators outspend the public at the ballot box nearly four-to-one!

…of the 68 ballot measures requiring additional money that voters approved between 1988 and 2009, 51 originated with the Legislature versus 17 with citizens and groups other than lawmakers…

The legislative-sponsored ballot measures cost a combined $9.8 billion compared with $2.05 billion for the nonlawmaker measures.

The most expensive legislative-sponsored measure was the $15 billion deficit fix in 2004. The highest price tag among the 17 initiatives that passed was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $500 million annual after-school program in 2002, before he was elected governor.

Not long ago, a team of scholars from the Reason Foundation published in the Wall Street Journal their findings that:

[Ballot initiatives] are not the root cause of California’s fiscal disaster. That cause is the government’s spending addiction. From 1990 to 2008, California’s revenues increased 167%, but total spending soared 181%.

The Golden State’s problem is not overly controlling voters—but out-of-control politicians.

Just a few weeks after that, Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe slams an attack on the initiative process by California supreme court chief justice Ronald M. George. Jacoby points out that most of the much-maligned amending of the California constitution has been perpetrated by the legislature:

California’s government may well be dysfunctional, and its constitution is indeed festooned with more than 500 amendments - 513, according to a 2006 report from the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California Law School. But only 43 of those amendments were originated by voters. The majority were placed on the ballot by the Legislature. It is perfectly legitimate to scold the voters for approving them, but not without making clear that nearly all of them were written by elected lawmakers.

California legislators need to look at themselves to make reforms before they destroy the citizens’ right to initiative and referendum with costly and unnecessary restrictions.

Picture: Citizens in Charge President Paul Jacob in California with Bob Stern, President of the Los Angeles based Center for Governmental Studies.