Initiative

I'm thinking of suing the state for legislative pay. As a voter. To secure the vote of Republican state senator Abel Maldonado, a holdout whose vote is needed to pass a massive budget compromise bill in California, Democrats are considering Maldonado's demand for three ballot measures, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The Webster-Kirkwood Times offers a very detailed rundown of the initiative petitions now circulating on the streets of Missouri.

That's not a record. The number topped $300 million during 2005, the year of Gov. Schwarzenegger's ill-fated special election, and in the 2006 cycle. But it's not chump change--more than the payroll of the New York Yankees, and a little less than the budget at smaller University of California campuses.

Not the 21st century, mind you. But South Dakota, where American direct democracy began in 1898, is considering whether to change its woefully outdated laws that permit initiative sponsors to write their own descriptions of what their measure would do. In the world outside South Dakota, titles and summaries have been written by public officials who are supposed to be neutral. (In California, it's the attorney general). More details of the proposal from this story in the Mitchell Republic.

Paul Jacob, the term limits advocate, emails and says that Citizens In Charge, his organization to advocate for the initiative process and the rights of people to petition their government, is growing. A year in, the group -- which is really two groups (one a 501 c 3, the other a different kind of non-profit, a c4) -- has six employees and is working on several fronts, including making it easier to qualify measures for the ballot in Oklahoma.

In the United States, ballot initiatives usually appear "naked" on the ballot. That is to say, voters decide yes or no on a particular statute or constitutional amendment, and that's it. There's only one choice.

I think it's safe to call this a trend: there is momentum, across the country, for putting new restrictions on the ballot initiative process. In Oregon, top state officials are trying to clamp down on the number of initiatives. The same is true in Arizona.

It appears that even those who believe in space aliens are optimistic about President Obama.

Readers of this blog know your blogger has been closely monitoring the effort to qualify a ballot initiative in the city of Denver to establish an extraterrestial commission. It's being pitched as a sort of civil defense thing--preparation for attack (and Denver is at some altitude, so the aliens would probably go their first).

Who is the next victim of the ugly campaign for and against Prop 8? Perhaps immigrants who don't speak English and live in middle Tennessee.

The Salt Lake Tribune has details here.