The inmates have taken over the asylum.
Go, inmates.
Unfortunately, the patients confined to the institution known as the Wacky World of Maine Politics don’t appear to have noticed they’re now in charge. These poor folks (sometimes referred to as taxpayers) keep shuffling around the grounds in droopy-lidded oblivion, while Warden John Baldacci and the state legislators who serve as guards act as if they have everything under control.
Somebody is in for some shock therapy.
On May 4, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued a complicated opinion, which had a lot to do with what the words “must” and “shall” mean. After pages of mind-numbing legal analysis, the Supremes concluded “must” and “shall” mean what you always thought they did, namely that somebody has to do something.
Once the justices had figured that out, they could move on to the slightly more comprehensible constitutional issue, which, in a nutshell, comes down to whether laws the Legislature passed to regulate publicly initiated referendums violate the state Constitution. As it turns out, they do. A majority of the court ruled those statutes null and void.
“[T]he right of the people to initiate and seek to enact legislation is an absolute right,” wrote Chief Justice Leigh Saufley. “It cannot be abridged directly or indirectly by any action of the Legislature.”
The immediate impact of this decision is that it allows a November referendum on the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR), a measure to cap state spending increases and require public votes to raise taxes. TABOR had been on legal hold because its supporters hadn’t turned in sufficient signatures by the deadline set in a law passed by the Legislature in 1998. But they had managed to submit enough names before a different deadline mentioned in the Constitution. According to the high court, only that constitutional deadline matters.
That’s the only aspect of this case that captured the news media’s attention. But the implications of this ruling go far beyond TABOR. It’s just a matter of time before somebody shakes off the effects of those legislatively administered tranquilizers and realizes ordinary people now have a powerful weapon to force state government to behave. Or, at least, misbehave in a more entertaining fashion.
Under the old rules, organizers of petition drives had one year from the time the state approved their ballot question to collect enough signatures to get their proposal on the ballot. But that year wasn’t really a year, because it included the time it took to print and distribute petitions, and the weeks it took to get names certified by municipal clerks. In reality, most referendum drives had to gather all the required signatures (currently, a little more than 50,000) in less than 10 months.
The court ruling changes all that. No longer will activists have to race to print petitions as soon as the state approves their ballot question. Nor will they have to stop collecting names 365 days later. They can now decide for themselves when the one-year signature drive begins and ends.
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that petitions be filed within a year of the date of the first signature,” wrote Saufley, “or invalidates an entire batch of petitions merely because some signatures are too old. Rather, the Constitution leaves initiative proponents free to file petitions when they choose, understanding that any signatures that are more than one year old at filing will not be counted toward their goal.”
