Here, Spencer, take this mirror…
In the January 17 House State Affairs hearing on 2025 House Joint Resolution 5003, now Amendment L on the 2026 ballot, Representative Spencer Gosch (R-23/Glenham) justified his support for requiring a 60% popular vote to amend the state constitution by complaining that his rural district doesn’t have the same voice in South Dakota politics as Sioux Falls. Rep. Gosch said that if Sioux Falls keeps growing while his rural district does not, “Our voice in our rural communities won’t matter anymore.” Gosch said he wants rural rights protected “at all costs”. He thus voted for HJR 5003, apparently to let his shrinking rural community cling to some sort of minority veto power over amendments a majority of South Dakotans may find desirable.
I could ask why Spencer doesn’t just make more babies, but that’s an inappropriate personal question.
The question I really want to ask is this: what rights can Sioux Falls take away from Glenham and all of rural South Dakota? Sioux Falls can’t stop Spencer from speaking his piece or carrying his piece on the 12 mean streets of Glenham. The United States Constitution guarantees Gosch and Glenham and all of his fellow non- (anti-?) Sioux Fallsians the same fundamental rights as the lucky denizens of the Queen City of the East. Even if Sioux Falls voters wanted to rewrite the state constitution via initiative and secure a slew of simple majority votes to amend away the rights of their country cousins, they (a) would still need to recruit voters from elsewhere, since all of Minnehaha and Lincoln counties constitute just under 30% of the registered South Dakota electorate, and (b) could only tinker with a state constitution whose Bill of Rights, Article 6, protects few if any substantive rights not already enshrined in the federal Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments. For instance, if urban South Dakotans put forward an amendment declaring “People from Glenham are troglodytes and don’t get to vote, ever again, on anything,” Gosch and his slighted neighbors could race over to Aberdeen and get Judge Kornmann to rule that disenfranchising Glenham violates the 14th Amendment.
Article 3 Section 1 of South Dakota’s Constitution guarantees its citizens one meaningful right that the United States Constitution does not: the right to legislate directly through initiative and referendum. South Dakotans urban and rural have exercised that right with great enthusiasm throughout South Dakota’s history. Gosch and his party have been working hard to take that right away from South Dakotans.
When South Dakotans doggedly exercise their right to amend their constitution, they demonstrate a far keener interest in protecting and expanding rights than they do in taking anyone’s rights away. My quick review of amendments on the statewide ballot from 2006 through next year’s election produces these two lists of measures making real changes in the rights South Dakotans enjoy. The first list consists of amendments that aimed to protect or expand rights; the second includes amendments that sought to restrict or remove rights. Asterisk mark the ones voters have approved.
Expand Rights:
- 2024 Amendment G: restore Roe v. Wade abortion rights
- 2024 Amendment H: expand voter rights with open primaries
- 2022 Amendment D*: expand Medicaid
- 2020 Amendment A*: legalize pot
- 2020 Amendment B*: legalize sports betting in Deadwood
- 2018 Amendment W: protect voter initiatives and initiative & referendum process from Legislative tinkering
- 2016 Amendment S*: promote crime victims’ rights from statute to constitution
- 2016 Amendment T: protect voter rights from gerrymandering with independent redistricting
- 2016 Amendment V: expand voter rights with open primaries
- 2014 Amendment Q*: legalize roulette, craps, and keno in Deadwood
Restrict Rights:
- 2026 Amendment L: require 60% vote to amend constitution (no vote yet!)
- 2024 Amendment F*: impose work requirement on Medicaid expansion beneficiaries
- 2022 Amendment C: require 60% vote for significant fiscal measures
- 2018 Amendment X: require 55% vote to amend constitution
- 2018 Amendment Z: ban amendments address more than one subject
- 2018 Amendment Y: narrow crime victims’ rights
- 2006 Amendment A*: ban same-sex marriage
In the past 20 years, South Dakota voters have had the chance to vote on ten amendments that expand rights and seven that restrict rights. They’ve voted for 50% of the expanders and 33% of the restrictors. So when it comes putting changes to rights in the state constitution, voters appears to prefer giving themselves more rights rather than taking rights away.
More importantly, look at who originated those amendments. Citizens initiated eight of ten rights-expanding amendments. The two that came from the Legislature offered the relatively limited, arguably trivial rights to bet on sports and play roulette, craps, and keno in Deadwood (which, by the way, according to the Census Bureau, is a rural community, so voters have twice shown they are willing to write into their constitution special favors for a rural community, so why again does Spencer a voter fatwa against rights in small towns?).
All seven of the rights-restricting amendments came from the Legislature. Gosch was in the House when four of those rights-restricting came up, and Gosch voted for all four of them.
Representative Gosch’s warning that constitutional amendments are a big-city attack on rural rights is misdirected. The record indicates that if any South Dakotans, from Glenham to Sioux Falls, should worry that constitutional amendments may take away their rights and their voice, they shouldn’t fear the citizens who circulate petitions at the Minnehaha County courthouse to put amendments to a statewide vote. They should fear Representative Spencer Gosch and his fellow Republican legislators in Pierre who work to limit citizens’ rights and protect legislators’ privilege.
Gosch has it backwards. Many of the initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s centered around rural issues, and had citizens from rural areas leading the campaign.
Let’s start with the uranium mining issue in 1980. That initiative was led by ranchers in the Black Hills area. Ranchers and rural residents crafted the wording and led the campaign.
The nuclear waste vote initiative began with citizens from the affected rural area around Igloo in Fall River County reaching out to allies across the state. Citizens in Fall River County played a key role in helping to craft wording, participating in the petitioning, and developing campaign strategy, bringing the 1984 initiative to a win.
In Hughes County and mega-pig farm sought to use water from the City of Pierre for their operation. Rural residents opposed to this development couldn’t petition or vote in the Pierre initiative that sought to shut down the water source, but they provided most of the organizing and funding to the effort.
An initiated Constitutional Amendment on corporate farming was led by rural interests. The amendment was brought to the ballot by petitioning all over the state. It won.
In rural Lawrence County rural residents and loggers were the original organizing force that led to several local and statewide initiatives on surface mining issues there. Although most lost, the Governor and Legislature had to respond to issue with legislation and better regulation.
Since then there have been efforts to develop the hemp industry, which is primarily led by rural interests.
It’s stupid to think urban areas in South Dakota don’t realize how important rural areas are to the economy and natural resources of South Dakota. Look at the recent vote on eminent domain for carbon pipelines.