Skip to main content

Present Reforms to Keep the Ghost of State Questions Past from Creating Future Headaches


Oklahoma, like many western states, allows its citizens to directly participate in the democratic process through citizen initiatives and referendums. In a referendum, the legislature directs a question to the people — usually to modify the state constitution, since the legislature can change statutes itself. An initiative requires no legislative involvement, but is initiated by the people via signature gathering, and can be used to modify statute or amend the constitution.
Collectively, the initiatives and referendums that make it onto the ballot are known as State Questions. 


Recently, there have been calls to make it more difficult to amend the constitution. At least two proposals are being discussed. One would diversify the signature requirement by demanding that a proportional amount of signatures come from each region of the state. The other would require a sixty percent majority to adopt a constitutional amendment rather than the fifty percent plus one currently in place.


Both of these proposals come from a good place. The constitution is inherently higher than statute; that is to say, when a statute and a constitutional provision conflict, the constitution always carries the day. That means legislators cannot simply overrule it like they could an old statute. While this protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority, it also limits the options that legislators have when circumstances change. This means the constitution needs to be constructed with precision. It needs to provide protections for precious individual liberties, but it shouldn't be crammed full of specific policy determinations, especially those that may need to adapt to changing political or economic conditions. 


Protecting the minority from a tyrannical majority is a particularly compelling reason to make the constitution harder to amend. The U.S. Constitution is incredibly difficult to change, so very little policymaking happens there. However, most states operate similarly to Oklahoma, and the length and content of their constitutions reflects this low bar for amendment. But in this instance, the federal model gets it closer to right. There may be an argument that amending the U.S. Constitution should be easier, but its stringent procedures ensure that it contains only the elements one would expect in a constitution. So enacting one or both proposals to make our constitution tougher to amend should be an easy call, right? 


Almost. There is one very important caveat that must be considered: what about all those old State Questions? If we used a substandard mechanism to enact them, are we now comfortable locking them in at a new (heightened) standard? If you had a mortgage with a variable rate, would you switch to a fixed rate when interest rates were high? Of course not. 


Six months after SQ802 locked in balloon payments, why should we switch to the fixed rate? The time to do so would have been back when rates were low, and 802 had not yet been the subject of one of the most irregular elections in living memory (at least to that time). If a proper three quarters or even sixty percent majority had been required in June, we would not find ourselves in this mess; 802 fell far short of a supermajority, with a margin of victory of less than one percent. 


Changing the majority requirement now, without added protections, is akin to someone borrowing money to build a safe right after their house was robbed. There's nothing left to protect, and the effort would have been better put into rebuilding the lost wealth. Fortunately, Oklahoma doesn't have to make such a choice. It should be quite simple to grandfather in old state questions. The new amendment should simply add that any state question that was previously passed may be repealed according to the requirements in place at the time it was passed. This lets us safeguard the future while leaving room to undo past mistakes. 


Mike Davis is a Research Fellow at 1889 Institute. He can be reached at mdavis@1889institute.org. 


The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.

Popular posts from this blog

1889 Institute's Statement Regarding School Closures

The 1889 Institute, an Oklahoma think tank, has released the following statement regarding Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to keep schools closed for the remainder of the school year. We at the 1889 Institute consider Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to close Oklahoma’s schools for the rest of the school year a gross overreaction to the coronavirus situation. Even in the best of times and circumstances, suddenly shifting every student in the state from traditional classrooms to online distance learning will have negative educational consequences. This in addition to the economic burden on two-earner families forced to completely reorder their lives with schools closed. We believe many of our leaders have overreacted to worst-case scenarios presented by well-intended health experts with no training or sense of proportion in weighing the collateral damage of shutting down our economy versus targeting resources to protect the truly vulnerable. We say reopen the schools and stop the madness. ...
Read more

If Licensing Protects Consumers, Why Are Licensing Laws Blatantly Anti-Consumer?

Once upon a time, there was a small island whose economy revolved around scuba-diving tourism. Unfortunately, the island elected legislators who considered scuba dangerous. Inexperienced divers would surface too quickly and get the bends. The legislature, wanting to make diving feel safer, passed a law that banned sharks in designated scuba diving zones. There were no known cases of sharks attacking divers, nor were divers being frightened into surfacing too quickly by sharks. This is what most occupational licensing schemes look like. Legislators act, giving the public a sense of security, and giving powerful industries protection from competition. The laws do almost nothing to help consumers. Not only are they futile, they are also deceptive.   Some licensing regimes, like the Oklahoma Real Estate Broker ’ s Act, take the deceit one step farther. Instead of just telling the sharks not to eat people (which they weren’t doing anyway) the act does the equivalent of gathering a group...
Read more

COVID-19 Proves Our Schools Are Social Service Centers First, Education Institutions Second

There is no way the 180-day (or 1,080 hours) school year can be completed by the end of previously established school calendars for this year given the fact that spring break has now already been effectively extended an additional two weeks. One option would have been to extend the school year into the summer. Given the level of family togetherness being experienced now, and the fact that incomes are being lost and many would be interested in making up the losses, it’s not unreasonable to expect vacation plans to be radically remade or canceled anyway. Instead, Oklahoma’s State Board of Education precipitously closed the schools and did not call for an extension of end-of-school dates. Thus, the summer option has been foreclosed. The State Board is within its rights. Oklahoma statutes (70 O.S. § 1-109 E) state, “A school district may maintain school for less than a full school year only when conditions beyond the control of school authorities make the maintenance of the term imp...
Read more

Follow the Science: Eliminate Social Distancing and Focus Resources to Protect the Vulnerable

As the country entered into an election year, COVID-19 reared its head and became an unusual campaign issue. Exposed to extreme politization, facts were buried in an abundance of misinformation perpetuated by the invocation of “science.” With the overly polarized rhetoric of stump speeches mercifully behind us, it is time to return to the rigor and integrity in research that public policy deserves. Now that the polls have closed, let’s move on, dig into the facts, and, indeed, follow the science.   Upon the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 illness, little was known about it. Symptomatically, it was even difficult to tell whether or not one had the disease given that the list of symptoms seemed to expand continually. Despite what little information existed, there was no lack of self-proclaimed experts claiming the knowledge necessary to contain the disease. With the state's presumptive authority and dubious expertise, numerous state and local governmen...
Read more