Homeless in Arizona

And for those of you who want to legalize marijuana, remember these laws are specifically aimed at preventing us from re-legalizing marijuana.

The "War on Drugs" is a jobs program for cops, and the Arizona Legislators that are owned by the police unions are doing the best they can to prevent us from ending the evil draconian laws that pay cops big bucks for sending people to prison for victimless marijuana crimes.

Wonder if Kathy Inman supports these laws?

I suspect she doesn't want us serfs repealing or passing any laws that are not approved by her buddies with the Marijuana Policy Project? You know like legalizing marijuana for the PEOPLE, rather then the 85 or so millionaire owners of medical marijuana dispensaries.

Source

Kwok: How some Arizona lawmakers don't trust you

Abraham Kwok, The Republic | azcentral.com 4:16 p.m. MST May 5, 2016

Abe Kwok: Some Arizona leaders think they're being handcuffed by voters who don't know better.

You would think the leadership at the state Capitol – the lot that kept the minority party in the dark on the state budget till the last minute, then ushered it to adoption with little public input less than nine days after its unveiling – feels sufficiently powerful.

You would be wrong.

There remains a good deal of feeling handcuffed by voters who don't know better. The seemingly perennial forces that seek to curb voters' might reared their heads again this session; a couple of resolutions that would rewrite the rules on initiatives made strong headway to the November ballot before being shelved for strategic reasons.

One, House Concurrent Resolution 2043, would ask voters to drastically lower the threshold for the Legislature to change initiatives. Current law, enshrined in 1998 by the Voter Protection Act, requires a 75 percent legislative majority to make changes to a voter-approved law, and even then the change must "further the initiative."

HCR 2043 would reduce that legislative majority to just above the percentage of voters who approved the initiative. In other words, an initiative that passed with 53 percent of the voters could be changed if lawmakers could muster 54 percent of the vote of their colleagues.

Another, HCR 2023, would allow lawmakers to wholesale repeal a voter-approved initiative if 60 percent of the Legislature's two chambers vote to do so.

So are they saying the masses are asses?

The desire to rewrite the initiative rules suggests the masses are asses. The lawmakers behind the efforts – Rep. J.D. Mesnard, among others – say no, not really. Except that the public is easily misled by special interests, doesn't understand financial math and can't anticipate "unintended consequences."

The speaker pro tempore, as others before him at the Legislature have done, points to Proposition 204 in 2000, when voters approved providing government-paid health care for Arizonans living at the federal poverty level. Supporters of the initiative at the time said the money from the tobacco settlement would cover the costs. Then enrollment swelled and expenditures mounted and, at a time when the economy stagnated, lawmakers got saddled with difficult budget choices.

Mesnard argues that the attempts to alter the initiative process are not "intended to poke the voters in the eye." Rather, he said, they are efforts to balance the power of the people and the power of the Legislature. The contention is, lawmakers have the luxury of time to debate, with rules committees examining legal issues and budget committees and staffers vetting the financial soundness of legislation – checks and balances that, the thinking goes, are absent with "lawmaking at the ballot."

"We just having a vetting process that doesn't exist with (ballot) initiatives," Mesnard said.

The argument about special-interest influence

The other evil that these resolutions target is the so-called special interests that drive initiatives. Marijuana comes up repeatedly, as does in the same breath "out-of-state groups" and "well-financed backers." (A separate effort, HCR 2024, would allow voters to pass initiatives and referendums by a simple majority unless those measures involve proposing the legalization of a drug that's "considered a controlled substance under the federal law at any time during 2014.”)

Mesnard: "Anymore, the success of an initiative is, 'Do you have the funding?' "

The distrust of voters isn't strictly an Arizona allergen, of course. In Oregon, among the states most known for lawmaking via ballot initiatives, lawmakers have precisely the powers that their counterparts in Arizona don't enjoy: the ability to amend voter-approved initiatives. Still, lawmakers there over the years attempted to increase the number of signatures required for proposed constitutional amendments (but not laws) and to require equal shares of signatures from Oregon's five congressional districts – the latter to dilute special-interest groups and paid petition circulators. Voters turned those down.

The current crop of resolutions at the Arizona Legislature is likely to return. They're not without support – both HCR 2043 and HCR 2023 passed the House; they have been held back in large part because supporters don't want to have them compete with a crowded field of other initiatives. The more prevailing reason is GOP legislators rather rally around a "no" campaign against what will be on the ballot – Clean Elections and marijuana legalization are among the expected issues.

"It's a conversation we need to continue to have," Mesnard said.

The fiscal fits that Prop. 204 generated were certainly a legitimate concern, but much of it was addressed by a constitutional amendment voters adopted in 2004 requiring initiatives that mandate state spending to have their own funding source.

The toughest questions Mesnard and the other backers face, I suspect, are, why is it that special-interest groups and their money are so persuasively toxic for voters but not so much for lawmakers, and why would the public vote to curtail its own powers as a check-and-balance against lawmakers.

Abe Kwok is an editorial columnist for The Republic and azcentral. Reach him at 602-444-8607 or akwok@azcentral.com. Twitter: @abekwok.