Citizens in Charge Foundation — a transpartisan national voter rights group focused on the ballot initiative and referendum process — has released its 2010 Report Card on Statewide Voter Initiative Rights. Those familiar with Kansas will not be surprised to learn that our state scores poorly, as do many other states.
Why are initiative and referendum rights important? The report’s introduction tell us:
As governments have grown at local, metropolitan, state, and federal levels, the power of entrenched factions has also grown, vis-à-vis the citizenry. Traditional representative government has proven unreliable in restraining itself constitutionally, often to the point of uniting all branches of America’s distributed powers against the very people it was meant to serve. Institutions of direct democracy have evolved to help restore this balance of power, in effect fulfilling a basic promise of republican governance: The right to petition government. Initiative and referendum thus serve as an expansion and perfection of one of the most basic principles of a limited republic.
About Kansas, the report says: “Kansas citizens do not have any statewide initiative and referendum rights. A majority of state citizens do enjoy local initiative and referendum rights.”
The local rights referred to are limited. The bar for local I&R in Kansas is set pretty high, and it’s difficult to exercise these rights.
The reports says that Kansas should do these things:
- Allow citizens to propose state constitutional amendments.
- Allow citizens to propose state laws.
- Allow citizens to put acts passed by the legislature to a referendum vote.
Kansas Governor Joan Finney pushed for initiative and referendum in 1991, but the measures, which require amending the Kansas Constitution, failed to get the required two-thirds vote in the Kansas House of Representatives.
Related posts:
- A Taxpayer Bill of Rights for Kansas, Please
- Kansas needs citizen-powered democracy
- Kansas smoking ban opponents meet in Wichita
- Oklahoma tinkers with petition law; Kansas has none
- Still Oklahoma’s most wanted
- Kansas Lags in Initiative and Referendum
- Property rights should control Kansas smoking decisions
- Taxpayer Bill Of Rights (TABOR) eviscerated
- Fact Sheet: The Truth About Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights
- Prospects for successful deregulation in Kansas
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We have a ballot initiative that we are going to launch Feb. 20th
a 1% sales tax for Wichita and Sedgwick Co. to reduce property taxes by approximately 50%.
Craig, what benefit is a tax shift going to do? Isn’t the problem the growth in government spending rather than the source of the tax revenue? Isn’t sales tax revenue going to put a greater burden on individuals and less on businesses? Not saying that’s a good or bad thing, but isn’t that what will happen?
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