Meyerson on TAP: The Republican War on Voter Initiatives Rolls On

A disinterested observer of the American system of government would likely conclude that it contained more than enough obstacles to majority rule to satisfy any opponent of allowing the people’s voice to determine major public questions. The very existence of both the Senate and the Electoral College thwarts majority rule; so does the control individual states wield over election law; so does the Senate’s super-majority filibuster; so does allowing state legislatures to carve their own districts and congressional districts as well.

But the anti-majority-rule sentiment has become so crucial to today’s Republican Party that it is now the sworn enemy of ballot measures, for fear that voters will use such measures to reverse the laws enacted by gerrymandered Republican legislatures. On questions of abortion, minimum wages, and expanding Medicaid eligibility through federal funds authorized by the Affordable Care Act, state voters have repeatedly used the initiative process to overturn Republican laws blocking access to abortion, keeping the minimum wage ludicrously low, and refusing to extend federally subsidized medical care to those in need of it.

This year, Republicans in multiple states are busily engaged in finding ways to negate what they expect to be the voters’ will on a host of initiatives to keep or make abortions legal. In Florida, one house of the legislature passed a bill requiring such measures to win two-thirds of the vote in order to pass, up from the current 60 percent. (The other house adjourned before it could reconcile its own draft with the version that had been passed.) In Missouri, where voters have previously raised the minimum wage, defeated a right-to-work law, expanded Medicaid eligibility and decriminalized marijuana use—overturning in each case legislatively enacted state policy—the Republican Senate passed a bill requiring ballot measures, most particularly this November’s one that would legalize abortion, not just to win a statewide majority but to win a majority in each of the state’s congressional districts. (Again, however, the other house adjourned before it could reconcile its version with the Senate’s.) In Arkansas, as my colleague Gabrielle Gurley has documented, the state’s Republican Secretary of State kicked a pro-choice initiative off the ballot for allegedly failing to follow procedures that the initiative campaign insisted they had followed faithfully. “Hell hath no fury,” Gabrielle’s piece wonderfully began, “like that of a woman scorned on a technicality.”

The latest wrinkle in Republican efforts to reduce vox populi to an inaudible croak came yesterday, when the Michigan Supreme Court struck down one of the GOP’s most outrageous efforts to disenfranchise state voters. In 2018, several groups of Michiganders (most prominently, One Fair Wage, which seeks to have tipped workers no longer subjected to sub-minimum-wage statutes) gathered enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot that would have both raised the state minimum wage of $10.33 and enabled tipped workers to receive the state minimum rather than the subminimum of $3.84. By law, initiatives then go to the legislature which is allowed to tinker with its language. Convinced voters would pass the measure, the Republican-controlled legislature devised a way to keep that from happening. It voted to enact the initiative as it existed, so voters would no longer have a say in the question, and then repeal that law as soon as the election was over. Had the law been enacted by a vote of the people rather than the legislature, it would have taken another vote of the people to repeal it. By their action, the Republican officials disenfranchised state voters both coming and going.

Yesterday, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the Republicans’ actions were unconstitutional, which thereby turns into law the text of the initiative that the legislature enacted: a minimum wage hike of at least $2 by February, to be followed by yearly cost-of-living increases through 2029, as well as bringing tipped workers fully up to the general minimum wage level by 2029 as well. What the Republican legislature and governor did in 2018, the Court ruled, “violates the people’s right to propose and enact laws.” In 2022, I should add, state voters transferred control of their legislature to the Democrats, having already transferred control of the governor’s office to Democrat Gretchen Whitmer.

Long a party bent on squashing minority rights (Blacks, immigrants, gays and lesbians et al.), with the single exception of Republican minorities’ rights, the Republicans are now also the party bent on squashing majority rule. Put all of that together and both the January 6th insurrection and Donald Trump’s promise to become a Day One dictator shouldn’t be all that surprising.