Price was right.
When Rep. Price Wallace, the Republican state legislator representing the citizens of House District 77 in Rankin and Simpson counties, died last week, one of the primary plaudits in his obituary was his leadership in attempting to restore ballot initiative rights to Mississippi voters.
Over the last five years, Wallace was dogged in his determination to restore those rights. He believed that Mississippi voters should have the right to bypass the Legislature and put their own stamp on changing state laws when and if the Legislature fails to be responsive.
The fight for lawmaking power has ebbed and flowed through the Legislature and the state courts for over a century. The Legislature adopted an earlier initiative process in 1914. The state Supreme Court upheld it in 1917 but reversed that rule five years later in another case. The high court passed on a chance to undo that ruling in 1991.
From 1993 through 2021, Mississippians had the option to take power away from the Legislature and change the state constitution as they deemed appropriate when the Legislature refused to act. The process was called initiative and referendum, and it was neither easy nor often successful. The Legislature designed the 1992 initiative process in Mississippi to be difficult for citizens who wished to circumvent the Legislature's power.
The House has attempted multiple times to restore some form of ballot initiative power to the voters, albeit a version that affords voters far less power than they had before the state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the state’s 1992 ballot initiative law was rendered “unworkable and inoperable” by the Legislature’s failure to amend the law to reflect the state’s loss of a congressional district after the 2000 census.
That legal challenge came after the 2020 elections when Mississippi voters approved a voter initiative authorizing a medical marijuana program outlined in Initiative 65 over the express objections of the majority of legislative leaders.
Mississippi voters gave Initiative 65 73.7% approval, while giving the legislative alternative, Initiative 65A, only 26.3% of the vote. The pro-marijuana initiative outpolled Republican incumbent President Donald Trump by some 20 percentage points with state voters.
State Supreme Court Justice Josiah Coleman wrote in that decision about the 1992 ballot initiative law: “To work in today’s reality, it will need amending – something that lies beyond the power of the Supreme Court.” The court’s overall decision was even blunter: “The reduction in Mississippi’s congressional representation renders it unworkable and inoperable on its face.”
But the fatal flaw in the 1992 ballot-initiative law was well known. Succinctly, legislative inaction on amending the 1992 ballot initiative law killed direct democracy through ballot initiative in this state, not the high court.
Oversight? Hardly. The Legislature grew increasingly concerned about the 1992 ballot-initiative laws after the 2015 elections. Initiative 42 sought to put “adequate and efficient” public school funding in the state constitution and empower the state’s chancery courts to enforce such funding. It failed, but by a tight margin.
Initiative 42 not only made it to the ballot, but it also became the defining issue in the 2015 statewide elections. From start to finish, the pro-42 effort was a well-oiled, well-financed political effort – one that provided a political roadmap to those who could put enough money and organizational muscle into a ballot initiative to thwart the will of the legislative majority.
So, there wasn’t a lot of legislative weeping when the Supreme Court ruling on the medical marijuana ballot initiative neutered the entire ballot initiative process. There is sentiment in the House to restore ballot initiative rights to state voters, with House Speaker Jason White leading the charge. But exactly how those rights are restored – or restricted – is where the process can derail. Wallace, in his post as House Constitution chair, was keenly aware of that fact. Wallace supported a process that required petitioners to gather around 140,000 signatures before it could be considered on the ballot.
Direct democracy in a representative government should be difficult. But when lawmakers return to the Capitol, they should remember Price Wallace’s efforts and find a way to restore the power of the ballot initiative to Mississippi voters in a responsible way. Price was right.
Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.
15 comments:
What continues to amaze me is how many people cheer for the very politicians and institutions that repeatedly strip them of their own power.
The Legislature and the Supreme Court took a functioning initiative process and destroyed it. They took away one of the few tools ordinary citizens had to bypass political insiders and force issues directly onto the ballot. Yet many of the same people most harmed by that decision continue to defend the politicians responsible for it.
That is what is so infuriating.
This should not be a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It is a citizen issue. It is about whether the people have the right to act when their elected officials refuse to listen.
Instead, partisan loyalty has become so powerful that many voters will applaud the loss of their own influence simply because the politicians taking it away wear the right jersey.
The initiative process existed because government was never supposed to have a monopoly on political power. The people were supposed to have a voice of their own. Watching elected officials take that voice away and then watching citizens defend it is one of the most frustrating political spectacles I have ever seen.
The people surrendered power and then celebrated the surrender.
Supreme Court got it right. Blame the legislature.
Kingfish is right. We are already supposed to be able to" petition "our government at every level and peacefully protest. We have tolerated giving away our rights and more power to politicians in sentences inserted into bills passed by our state legislatures.
It is a citizen issue.
When it comes to marjidope it surely was not. Take away the MASSIVE funding of the one legislator and the trojan horse pot "medicine" initiative never makes it to the ballot.
@8:04 should us where we can the state initiative process in our founding documents.
Sorry, show us.
I think we elect represenatives to lead, debate, and ultimately make policy decisions on our behalf. There is no requirement that the States preciesely follow how the Federal government functions, but we are a represenative republic and the concept of a ballot referendum is no where in our national constitution. The founders expresley made it very hard to amend the constituitiion - 2/3 support in both houses of Congress or 2/3 of States call for a Constitutional Convention just get it to the ratification process which takes 3/4 of the States. That is a tall order and no suprise it has only been 17 times not including the Bill of Rights.
I think if a State has an initiative, it should be hard to get it on the ballot and then hard to pass. I live in Louisiana - the things that get put on a ballot referendum here is ridculous. Policy decisions that the average voter has no business making.
On the other hand, I get a chuckle out of the people in Mississippi who were all hands on deck for that stupid Personhood Amendment that got on the ballot 15 years ago, but are now opposed to the possibility of having a State referndum regarding abortion access. Chicken shit.
Don't you all realize that the average citizen in Mississippi is just too stupid to vote on the law? That's what the Legislature seems to think. Heaven forbid we actually have a say in anything.
I always liked Price. He was a good guy. However, when it came nut cutting time(farmer speak), on the school choice bill, he was chicken scat and conveniently said he had an issue with his poultry house equipment and couldn't show up to vote. The majority of his constituency was vehemently opposed to it passing and very outspoken about it both on social media and face to face with him. No matter your stance on the issue, it was very important to the people who elected him and he couldn't take the time to ride up to Jackson to vote and come back to the farm. Now, being in and around the poultry business myself, I can guarantee if he had asked neighbors, friends, the integrator he grows for(Koch, Tyson, Peco, etc.), his service man, or a service company to come help handle it because he needed to go vote on a pressing issue, they would have jumped all over to help. But he didn't. I have a hard time believing he had everyone else's best interests at heart, when he couldn't even show up for the biggest issue of that legislative session.
The majority of his constituency was vehemently opposed to it passing ...
Do you have a poll? Social media don't count.
After the Dobbs decision, states started putting abortion rights on the ballot by referendum, and it started passing state-by-state.
That’s when the 10th Amendment states’ rights advocates went silent.
And that is why the Mississippi legislature has not, and probably will not, fix the referendum.
It’s (still) all about abortion.
The Supreme Court got it wrong— on purpose.
The initiative process was not “unworkable”
You only had to use the 5 congressional districts as they existed in 1992; which is exactly how the three prior initiatives had worked.
The Court wanted to kill medical marijuana. So they ignored the precedent
That is because Jim Hood issued a crap opinion. He was want to issue opinions that helped out his friends. The Supreme Court got it right. I covered the lawsuit from the beginning and told you exactly why Madison was going to win. It was really a slam dunk. Blame the legislature for being derelict in its duty to fix the damn law before the lawsuit but then, the Capitol Clowns have always hated the idea of you having the right to an initiative. Now thanks to abortion and the Barksdale education initiative, we will probably never get it back
The legislative, executive and judicial branches had all read and applied the constitutional initiative process the same way (using the old five districts) to pass three initiatives—after redistricting.
The motor voter initiative for example passed after redistricting (4 congressional districts) under the same supposedly flawed constitutional procedure, and yet it is still on the books as valid law-not struck.
What changed? Not the constitution nor the precedent of prior interpretations.
Only the subject of the initiative—medical marijuana
Blah blah blah. Funny how you don't argue what the actual language of the constitution says but cite all these so called interpretations. Jim Hood got it wrong. Period. We can debate the reason but he got it wrong. The SOS relied on his opinions so no, the executive branch was not interpreting the law but doing what Hood said to do. You know what did not change? The language in the constitution. It's pretty clear what it says. Just because Jim Hood ignored its plain meaning and made up his own law does not mean the constitution is wrong. What happened was the issue finally got before a Court and the Court blew the whistle.
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