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

When It Comes to the Cox Center, “What if I Get to Meet a Movie Star?” Isn’t Good Enough

In a recent   post , 1889 Institute expounded on the fiduciary duty of elected officials “to act in the best interest of the people of the state as a whole,” a “high duty, executed as a public trust … wherein one puts the people’s interest above one’s own.” This fiduciary duty must not stop with elected officials. Once an elected body or an elected official – the legislature, a city council, the governor, or a mayor – has taken final action, the faithful implementation of each enacted law, policy, or program falls to an army of bureaucrats. Thus, a fiduciary duty to execute laws and policies with diligence and integrity, tantamount to that of elected officials, must extend to government employees. Recently, I had a few moments to sit down and watch a show with my children. Unsurprisingly, my son picked a series entitled “The Stinky and Dirty Show.” I was naturally skeptical that the show would yield any real value. However, as I watched, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Each ep...
Read more

Oklahoma Leaders Should Demand Congress Fix the Supreme Court’s Mess, Not Rush to Strike a Deal with the Tribes

Five lawyers in Washington, D.C. have announced that many of us have been living on Indian reservations all this time, we just didn’t know it. In response, several of our elected state leaders have made noises indicating they are in the process of giving away the store in resulting negotiations with tribal leaders, apparently driven by defeatism and panic. They should get off this losing course, and instead demand that the one body that can fix this mess do so: Congress. First, how we got here. Jimcy McGirt, a revolting human being who was convicted of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing his wife’s four-year-old granddaughter, has been justly rotting away in a cage for some 20 years as part of the 1,000-years-plus-life-in-prison sentence he was mercifully handed by an Oklahoma jury in 1997. McGirt came up with a clever legal theory, though. He claimed the State of Oklahoma never had jurisdiction to prosecute him because he is Indian and his crimes were committed on Creek reserv...
Read more

America’s Public Schools Fail Black Children, School Choice Empowers Them to Overcome

A consistent feature of racists through history is that they have fully understood the power of education, or the lack of education, as a tool of oppression. Extraordinary efforts were taken to keep black slaves illiterate, including killing those who deigned to learn to read. After the Civil War, black schools were frequent targets of attack. It should be no surprise that the longest and hardest fight in the Jim Crow South was over public school segregation. Segregationists worked to keep African Americans from lunch counters and in the back of city buses, but they fought like hell to keep black kids out of white schools. As our nation convulses with discussions of systemic racism, nearly all of the focus has been on questions of policing and the use of force. This is appropriate, of course. But I’d like to highlight a less discussed institution for which a strong case can be made that systemic racism prevails: public education.   An accepted definition of “systemic” or “structu...
Read more

COVID Inspires Tyranny for the "Good" of Its Victims

The Christian philosopher, C.S. Lewis, once said, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies." The moral busybodies C.S Lewis warns of reminds me of those who would have Americans give up their liberty to combat COVID-19.   A recent Oklahoman op-ed compared COVID-19 to World War II, stating that the number of deaths from COVID-19 is approaching the number that died fighting for this country and the freedoms it protects. This comparison is, of course, nonsense. This suggests that a virus with a high survivability rate is an equivalent threat to the Nazi and Japanese regimes that brutally murdered millions. The piece uses wartime rationing of meat and cheese, a sacrifice necessary to ensure men on the front lines had adequate nutrition, to justify Americans accepting counterproductive lockdowns in exchange for additional stimulus c...
Read more