Ronald George – ThisIsCommonSense.org

Initiative rights are under nonstop assault from the political class.

Fortunately, most voters know the value of being able to end-run or reverse the bad decisions of lawmakers. And just a few clear-thinking defenders of initiative rights are enough to expose the murky evasions of the politicians and their pals.

One recent example is a Boston Globe column by Jeff Jacoby entitled “Something stinks, but it isn’t voters.” Jacob details an attack on initiative rights by the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Ronald George. I’ve already commented on Georgie’s jumbled judgment, but let me quote Jeff’s summary of how such critics think. He observes that these folk simultaneously “believe that citizens are too dumb to judge the merits of legislation — and that such decisions are therefore best left to the lawmakers they apparently weren’t too dumb to elect.”

Lawmakers are especially annoyed by any citizen-imposed restraint on their ability to tax and spend the electorate into the poorhouse. Like California’s Proposition 13. In another fine column, Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association recalls that at the time, “people were losing their homes to double-digit annual tax increases.”

Prop 13 gave folks a way to keep what was theirs. Despite the greedy grabbing of the political class. Who’d rather, you know, just have a free hand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court recently declared the state’s government “dysfunctional.”

But Judge Ronald George didn’t bother to tell this to his employers, the people of California. Instead, the judge delivered his speech all the way across the continent, in Massachusetts, at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judge George specifically blames Golden State voters as chief culprits in California’s severe budget woes. While admitting that legislators lack the “political will” to make the tough spending cuts or tax hikes that he believes necessary, George nonetheless says there may have to be “some fundamental reform of the voter Initiative process.”

What the judge doesn’t tell his earnest East Coast audience is that less than 10 percent of amendments to the California constitution come through initiatives.

The voters, he claims, are over-influenced by special interests. But he neglects to mention that the much-loved, much-hated tax-cutting Proposition 13 — and Prop 140, the measure placing term limits on legislators — were both heavily outspent by the state’s most powerful lobbies. Both nevertheless prevailed at the ballot box.

Lastly, his Honor bellyaches that he and fellow jurists are “called upon to resolve legal challenges to voter Initiatives” and sometimes “incur the displeasure of the voting public.”

My heart bleeds for them, of course, but isn’t adjudicating disputes sort of expected of judges?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.