History
Mississippi is the only state that once had a statewide initiative process
but lost it: not because the people rejected it, but because the state
supreme court in 1922 decided on the basis of a legal technicality to
throw the I&R provision out of the state constitution.
Agitation for I&R in Mississippi achieved partial success for the first time
in 1912, the peak year for I&R success nationwide. Mississippi voters
approved an I&R amendment by a nearly two to one margin, but the
measure failed because of the state’s requirement that a “supermajority”
of all votes cast in the election, rather than a simple majority of votes on
the I&R question, ratify it. This was the same requirement that defeated
Minnesota’s I&R amendment in three elections.
In Mississippi, after the initial defeat, I&R supporters led by State
Representatives N. A. Mott of Yazoo City and Frank Burkitt of Okalona
succeeded in pushing their proposal through the legislature a second
time, and it was on the ballot again in 1914. This time it passed by a
margin of more than two to one, though it barely passed the
supermajority requirement.
In 1916 voters successfully petitioned to refer a bill passed by the
legislature appointing a certain Z. A. Brantley to the office of game and
fish commissioner, and then rejected the law by popular vote. Brantley
took the case to court, charging that the I&R amendment was not valid.
On March 26, 1917 the state supreme court upheld the referendum and
the I&R process (State v. Brantley, 113 Miss. 786, 74 South, 662, Ann. Cas.
1917E, 723). An elated Assistant Attorney General Lamar F. Easterling, who
defended the I&R process in the case, wrote the following day that the
decision “settles the matter finally in this state.”
Easterling’s assessment proved premature. Five years later, a citizen
group backing an initiative to change the salary of the state revenue
agent turned in enough petition signatures to qualify the measure for the
November 1922 ballot. Stokes V. Robertson, the revenue agent, went to
court to keep it off the ballot, again attacking the validity of the I&R
amendment.
The state supreme court, reversing its 1917 judgment, held that
initiatives or referendums on statutes are one thing, but initiative
constitutional amendments are another, and thus the constitutional
initiative power should have been approved in 1914 in a separate
amendment. And because it was not, the entire I&R provision was held
unconstitutional. The court abolished the people’s right to self-government
by I&R, finding that: “The Constitution is the product of the people in their
sovereign capacity. It was intended primarily to secure the rights of the
people against the encroachments of the legislative branch of the
government” (Power v. Robertson, 130 Miss. 188, 93 So. 769). In effect, the
court said that it had to destroy the people’s rights to self-government in
order to save them. The legislature could have remedied the situation by
approving two new amendments, one covering statutory, and the other
constitutional, initiatives. But it took no such action.
The issue lay dormant for over half a century, until in 1977 Upton Sisson
of Gulfport took up the cause of I&R. Sisson, who served as state
representative from 1956 to 1960, was a civil rights attorney who had
argued one of the landmark “one man, one vote” reapportionment cases
in the U.S. Supreme Court. At age 70 and in failing health, Sisson returned
to the legislature to lobby for I&R.
Although unsuccessful, his efforts sparked enough interest in the
subject that State Attorney General Bill Allain, running for governor in 1983,
pledged to work for passage of an I&R amendment if elected. Allain won,
but he was unable to fulfill his pledge.
However, the power of initiative and referendum was eventually
restored to the citizens of Mississippi by the passage of Senate Concurrent
Resolution No. 616 during the 1992 regular session. Initiative and
referendum had been a widely discussed campaign issue in the 1991 fall
elections. Its eventual passage in the 1992 regular session of the
legislature was widely hailed as a progressive reform of government. It
was approved by an astounding 70% of the popular vote in the 1992 fall
elections – making Mississippi the last state to adopt the statewide
initiative process.
However, the initiative process that was established in the state is one
of the most difficult in the country. Since 1992, only two statewide
initiatives have made it to the ballot – both to establish term limits – and
both were defeated.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.