TALLLAHASSEE - The lobbies that actually run Florida seem to be getting mighty apprehensive of the voters who ought to.
That's the good news behind Senate President Jim King's decision to appoint a select committee on constitutional amendment reform.
This is good news, as we shall see, because it could present a bargaining opportunity to well-motivated legislators. (Yes, there are still a few.) If the lobbies want to be protected from the people, they should have to give the people something in return. Tax reform, for example. Or, at long last, fair redistricting.
The select committee would be a waste of time, King knows, if there didn't happen to be powerful lobbies that share his concern that it's too easy for citizen activists to put things into the Constitution that don't belong there, such as high-speed rail and comfort for pregnant pigs.
This is, of course, hardly an original issue. The initiative process has been worrisome long before the pigs and bullet train. The gambling lobby demonstrated way back in 1978 that with enough money you can get enough signatures to put any fool thing on a Florida ballot, though not necessarily enough votes to actually pass it.
One could suspect the current state of corporate alarm as having something to do with the tax reform petition that former Sens. John McKay and Jack Latvala and former Comptroller Bob Milligan are circulating. See www.fairamendment.com.)
Or with the "hometown democracy" initiative that would require a referendum on any amendment to any land use plan.
Or with the two initiatives that would require honorable redistricting and encourage competitive elections.
The power structure now wants to change the rules before the next ballot at which, they seem to fear, some of these initiatives might pass. The plan is to put some "reform" on the primary ballot next September so that if the voters approve it - hardly a certainty - it would apply to any petitions that make it to the November ballot.
One suggestion is to require approval of constitutional amendments by 60 percent or even two-thirds of those voting, instead of a simple majority. This would have doomed the prekindergarten, class size and pregnant pig initiatives, not to mention the Constitution itself in 1968.
Another is to require more signatures on the petitions. The present threshold is 8 percent of the last presidential turnout, which means 488,722 valid signatures for any petition aimed at the 2004 ballot. This is a dubious idea because it would would not deter sponsors with very deep pockets.
The best idea involves an approach the Senate rejected last spring: Restrict constitutional initiatives to subjects such as redistricting or term limits, which, whatever one thinks of their merits, are appropriate subjects for a constitution. But there needs to be another side to that coin, which wasn't in the proposal last spring. That's to let the voters also make laws that with enough nerve, the Legislature could change. This would have been the better way to take on issues like smoking, class size, net fishing and high-speed rail.
The lobbies are not necessarily wrong about all of this. In a society as large and complex as Florida, it is easy to take direct democracy a step too far, as I think the land-use referendum would do. Government by referendum is bad policy.
But the developers and builders who fear that initiative need to face up to the reason behind it: Environmentalists have given up hope for growth management by any responsible means. Just as Gov. Reubin Askew, having given up on any effective ethics legislation, successfully took his crusade to the people in 1976, which marked the first successful initiative.
The same sense of gut-wrenching frustration accounted for the net ban, antismoking, high-speed rail and class size initiatives. If the people of Florida had reasons to believe that the Legislature would deal fairly with what it should, they wouldn't be so receptive to initiatives.
Something really does need to be done about initiatives, if only to stop the doctors and trial lawyers from using the process as a battlefield on which a lot of innocent people could get hurt. But care needs to be taken that we don't stop the good initiatives along with the bad. Fortunately, the only way to limit initiatives is to amend the Constitution, which takes a three-fifths vote of both houses, and a three-fourths vote if the purpose is to have an early referendum next September. That presents a marvelous opportunity to demand something in return. The Democrats, for example, would be foolish not to demand redistricting reform as their price for not blocking the early election, which they have the votes to do. There are also enough legislators in both parties who believe in tax reform to successfully make that their price too. Whether there are enough with the guts is another question.
