GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS

When I speak of government affairs I am always aware of the need for Rhode Island to have a system of voter initiative.

While there are many that have vested interests in keeping the present system of legislative exclusiveness due to the fact that they can better control the legislature through paid lobbying efforts, there is a real need in Rhode Island to allow for the citizen to propose change.

Certainly a citizen can ask that a Representative or Senator introduce legislation on a particular subject, but even if the politico is responsive to the constituent, it is frequently, if not always, lost in the legislative maze.

There is little support for citizen initiated bills in the General Assembly. There is a closing of ranks that makes the voice silenced.

To counter this there should be a system of voter initiative. It works in more than half the states, and, to many people’s surprise, it is available to many Rhode Islanders on a municipal level.

The reason it is allowed on the municipal level and not the state level provides much for questioning. If it is good enough to propose municipal law, then why is it bad to propose state law?

The answer is that municipalities are weak in Rhode Island. Any effort that passes in a municipality can easily be trumped by the state legislature, assuming that the municipal law is within the realm of the restricted area of municipal regulation.

The fact is that politicians fear voter initiative. So do lobbying groups that are primarily concerned with maintaining their spot at the budgetary trough.

Those opposing voter initiative frequently use the fear card to scare these politically vested interests into having their constituents lobby against such efforts.

Statewide voters want voter initiative. They have said so, but the politicians turn deaf ears.

I would venture to say that if voter initiative had been enacted when I first spoke about it twenty-five years ago, there might have been a far different governing system today and we may well have avoided the budget crisis we now face. But it just didn’t fit in with the political games that are played out on Smith Hill.

Instead of having a government responsive to the people, we have a self-serving bunch that answer only to lobbying interests. The whole system, much like a fish, rots from the head down.

The fears of bad voter initiative had been ironed out in the legislature, and yet the bills recently proposed have all gone down in flames. The voter initiative movement has been thwarted by the very people we have elected and the people now suffer. Interestingly, we fought a revolutionary war over the issue of taxation without representation. The irony is that taxation is no better with the respresentation we have.

Voter initiative is not anywhere near as ominous as the opponents suggest. In fact, the concept itself came about when business dominated legislatures were denying various rights and privileges to its people. One example is how Wyoming used voter initiative to secure voting rights for women prior to the United States Constitution being amended.

The point is that the people who control the government fear voter initiative, and probably rightly so. True voter initiative would keep politicians in their places and protect the people from a runaway government.