GOP just wants a Lawmaker Protection Act

Reforms require a problem with the status quo and a plausible plan to correct it. The plethora of proposals at the Arizona Legislature aimed at overhauling the ballot initiative process — that is, citizens’ ability to make or change law — misses on one or both marks.

Take the most recent legislation that gained House passage on a party-line vote, House Concurrent Resolution 2029. It seeks to amend the state Constitution by requiring citizen initiatives to have a fixed percentage of registered-voter signatures from each of the 30 legislative districts to qualify for the ballot.

House Speaker J.D. Mesnard said the measure would ensure buy-in of an initiative from people across the state.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, said he wants to limit wellheeled special interests’ influence on ballot measures, especially those espousing liberal causes. That dog don’t hunt. It presently takes more than 152,000 signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot, no small order. Between paying for petition gatherers and advertising/ mailing campaigns, initiatives can run into the millions of dollars. If anything, HCR 2029 would assure only well-heeled special interests could afford to stay in the game.

Nor has the Arizona electorate been overwhelmed by a liberal agenda on the ballot. In the last four general elections, there have been five citizen initiatives — two passed (minimum wage, medical marijuana), three failed (recreational marijuana, a permanent 1-cent tax to fund education, and open election/top 2 primary).

And since 2000, citizen initiatives have accounted for less than half — 32 of 87 — of the ballot questions. The others were referred to voters by lawmakers (five from a legislative commission recommending salary increases for legislators).

The 32 included liberal fare the likes of barring inhumane confinement of farm animals, legalizing medical marijuana and banning cockfighting. But also included were freedom against mandatory health-care participation, stiffer voter-registration requirements and sanctions against employers that hire illegal immigrants — hardly campaigns waged by the left.

For every union-backed minimumwage proposal, there were those pushed by businesses and conservative groups. Remember the initiative to extend the payday-loan industry? Or the one-woman, one-man Marriage Protection Amendment?

Mesnard’s buy-in-from-everywhere argument is particularly disingenuous. Using his logic, anyone seeking statewide office should have to obtain a percentage of signatures from each legislative district to get on the ballot. I’m suspecting there will be no rush to reconcile that inconsistency.

The most palatable point is HCR 2029, and other concurrent resolutions, has to go before the voters.

A proposal that doesn’t, House Bill 2404, and which would ban paying petition gatherers by the signature, similarly rests on a faulty premise. Its sponsor, Rep. Vince Leach, R-Tucson, said the move would reduce fraud because circulators wouldn’t have an incentive to boost their signature totals possibly by making up names.

Except there’s already a mechanism to vet petition signatures and a designated enforcer: the secretary of state.

And the argument cited by Leach and Mesnard for HB 2404 — that last year’s minimum-wage Proposition 206 lacked sufficient valid signatures but got on the ballot on a technicality — is a revisionist narrative.

The signatures that were invalid involved circulators who failed to register with the state, not of forgery or fraud that the bill’s sponsors are targeting. And the technicality? The measure’s opponents flat-missed a deadline to mount a court challenge. A bit of sour grapes?

Two other House resolutions — HCR 2002 and HCR 2007 — target the 1998 Voter Protection Act, which shields any voter-approved measure from being changed unless three-quarters of the Legislature vote to do so and only if the change “furthers the purpose” of the measure. That is a steep standard that makes amending or overriding an approved initiative next to impossible.

It would be one thing to offer up a more reasonable compromise — say, a two-thirds vote by the Legislature to amend an initiative, as my colleague Robert Robb and others have suggested. But HCR 2002 is a wholesale repeal of the Voter Protection Act, without promise of an alternative.

Absent of a full repeal of the act, HCR 2007 would exempt from it referendums — the process citizens can use to stall a Legislature-approved law and put it to a public vote instead. If the exemption wins approval, lawmakers would be able to come back and approve the same law that Arizonans voted to toss out.

It seems what legislators want is a Lawmaker Protection Act to pre-empt everyone else.

There are valid discussions to be had about better and fairer distribution of power, so let’s have them.

The current set of reforms amounts to an all-take-no-give proposition that won’t win voters’ hearts or minds.