How can I spend all this time talking about a super-bad public-institution-wrecking initiative and not cover the two super-good democracy-boosting initiatives that are worth your signature?
Sioux Falls businessman and activist Rick Weiland is once again circulating petitions to defend democracy. This election cycle, Weiland’s Dakotans for Health is proposing two short, simple, and clear constitutional amendments to protect initiative and referendum from Legislative sabotage. The first would add one sentence to Article 3 Section 1 to protect ballot questions approved by the voters:
Protecting Approved Measures: The Legislature may not repeal or amend a measure proposed by the people and approved by the electors for seven years from the measure’s effective date, except by a three-fourths vote of the members elected to each house, and only if the repeal or amendment is approved by the electors of the state at the general election immediately following Legislative passage.
The former addresses the angst citizens often feel when they consider bringing initiatives: why go to all the effort of petitioning and campaigning when the Legislature will just foul it up? The Legislature outright repealed Weiland’s voter-approved Anti-Corruption Act in 2017. The Legislature tried to amend the indexed minimum wage with a lower youth minimum wage in 2015; we foiled that odious change only by referring the youth minimum wage to a statewide vote. The amendment to protect approved measures would end that trouble: legislators seeking to undo the people’s will would have to get the people to change their minds or wait seven years.
Weiland’s amendment checks Legislative power but not judicial power. His amendment wisely does not stop judges from ruling that ballot measures violate the state or federal constitution and enjoining their enforcement. Opponents of democracy can still lawyer up to get a judge to toss a voter-approved ballot measure; they just can’t lobby up to get the Legislature to do so.
This amendment respects the constitution in a separate indirect way. Since the swift repeal of IM 22, advocates have been afraid to offer their proposals as regular initiatives, which the Legislature can repeal without restraint, and have instead offered Medicare expansion, marijuana legalization, and other policies as constitutional amendments, which the Legislature can’t change without voter approval. Insulating regular initiatives from Legislative meddling would take the pressure off advocates to write their changes into the constitution, our basic framework of government, and instead place their technical policy proposals in statute, where they more properly fit.
Weiland’s second amendment, adding one more sentence to Article 3 Section 1, would protect the initiative and referendum process from Legislative sabotage:
Protecting the Process: Any law or measure passed by the Legislature affecting the people’s exercise of their right to initiative and referendum is effective only if approved by the electors of the state at the general election immediately following Legislative passage.
This measure would stop the Republican war on initiative and referendum cold. Right now, to stop the Legislature from nickel-and-diming initiative and referendum to death with bureaucratic obstacles, advocates of direct democracy have to troop off to our remote and wintry Capitol and make the case against those bills to Republican legislators, many of whom either don’t understand the technical details of the petition process or who don’t care and just want to kill initiative and referendum. Weiland’s amendment would shift the burden of argument to legislators, who would have trot their geographical quotas, circulator registries, deadline changes, and petition fonts, and out to the people and convince a majority of voters of the merits of their wonky tinkerings with the people’s right to legislate. Republican legislators default to yes on bills that their caucus proposes to hamstring the initiative and referendum process; put those sneaky, technical, hard-to-understand measures on a general election ballot, and voters in general default to no.
Amidst state and federal assaults on democracy, Weiland offers two amendments to protect direct democracy in South Dakota. One of the most concrete actions you can take to defend democracy in South Dakota right now is to get hold of Rick via Dakotans for Health and go sign both of his initiative petitions.
South Dakotans, you mean you won’t give total control of you futures to people like the bad singer from Dell Rapids? Shame on you, you obviously need mind control courtesy of MKUltra.
Framing these measures, initiated, as defending democracy is coined oppositely as “an attack on the people’s democratic rights to lobby,” Mr. Weiland. Direct democracy leads to big, dark, out-of-state money coming from groups from elsewhere who do not have the best interests of Real South Dakotans in mind.