"POLITICS AND OTHER MISTAKES"
The restoration of chaos and order
By Al Diamon
The inmates have taken over the asylum.Go, inmates.
Unfortunately, the patients confined to the institution known as the Wacky World of Maine Politics don't appear to have noticed they're now in charge. These poor folks (sometimes referred to as taxpayers) keep shuffling around the grounds in droopy-lidded oblivion, while Warden John Baldacci and the state legislators who serve as guards act as if they have everything under control.
Somebody is in for some shock therapy.
On May 4, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued a complicated opinion, which had a lot to do with what the words "must" and "shall" mean. After pages of mind-numbing legal analysis, the Supremes concluded "must" and "shall" mean what you always thought they did, namely that somebody has to do something.
Once the justices had figured that out, they could move on to the slightly more comprehensible constitutional issue, which, in a nutshell, comes down to whether laws the Legislature passed to regulate publicly initiated referendums violate the state Constitution. As it turns out, they do. A majority of the court ruled those statutes null and void.
"[T]he right of the people to initiate and seek to enact legislation is an absolute right," wrote Chief Justice Leigh Saufley. "It cannot be abridged directly or indirectly by any action of the Legislature."
The immediate impact of this decision is that it allows a November referendum on the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), a measure to cap state spending increases and require public votes to raise taxes. TABOR had been on legal hold because its supporters hadn't turned in sufficient signatures by the deadline set in a law passed by the Legislature in 1998. But they had managed to submit enough names before a different deadline mentioned in the Constitution. According to the high court, only that constitutional deadline matters.
That's the only aspect of this case that captured the news media's attention. But the implications of this ruling go far beyond TABOR. It's just a matter of time before somebody shakes off the effects of those legislatively administered tranquilizers and realizes ordinary people now have a powerful weapon to force state government to behave. Or, at least, misbehave in a more entertaining fashion.
Under the old rules, organizers of petition drives had one year from the time the state approved their ballot question to collect enough signatures to get their proposal on the ballot. But that year wasn't really a year, because it included the time it took to print and distribute petitions, and the weeks it took to get names certified by municipal clerks. In reality, most referendum drives had to gather all the required signatures (currently, a little more than 50,000) in less than 10 months.
The court ruling changes all that. No longer will activists have to race to print petitions as soon as the state approves their ballot question. Nor will they have to stop collecting names 365 days later. They can now decide for themselves when the one-year signature drive begins and ends.
"Nothing in the Constitution requires that petitions be filed within a year of the date of the first signature," wrote Saufley, "or invalidates an entire batch of petitions merely because some signatures are too old. Rather, the Constitution leaves initiative proponents free to file petitions when they choose, understanding that any signatures that are more than one year old at filing will not be counted toward their goal."
That may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Because the clock no longer starts ticking on the one-year deadline as soon as the ballot question is approved by the state, those supporting a referendum not only have all the time they need to prepare their campaign to collect the necessary names, but they also have the ability to hold petitions in abeyance while they see if the governor and Legislature will address their issues to their satisfaction.
Imagine this scenario. The Legislature is considering a tax-reform bill. It would expand the sales tax, using some of the new money to pay for education (thereby lowering property taxes), with the rest going to reduce the state income tax. Trouble is, lots of special interests (translation: lawyers, accountants and amusement park operators) oppose this plan because they don't want their businesses subjected to sales taxes. Under the old system, the bill would go nowhere.
But reality has shifted. Tax-reform backers could have petitions to put the measure out to referendum already prepared. They could warn legislators that if they didn't act sanely, the power to make the decision would be taken away from them and given to the people. Without unconstitutional time limits to hinder the referendum process, that threat would have to be taken seriously.
Tax reform would pass, one way or another. Deliriously happy citizens would dance naked in the streets.
Go nuts.
E-mail your crazy comments to me at ishmaelia@gwi.net.
