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HOWARD TROXLERFirst of two parts.
We're going to have a debate and election this year on whether to crack down on citizen petitions for amending the Florida Constitution. You will be asked to give up some of your power.
Right off the bat, let's be clear: This is an attempt by the Legislature and the Florida Chamber of Commerce to put the uppity citizens back in their place.
They don't describe it that way, of course. They will try to convince voters that we are signing too darned many of these petitions, and that we are asking for the wrong stuff.
It'll be a fun fight.
However, before we get to that fight, we first have to get through a warmup fight.
With typical ham-handedness, the Legislature is trying to stack the deck. Consider:
The Senate wants to hold the election on Aug. 31, the day of the primary election, instead of the November general election. Fewer citizens will vote. More than 1.8-million voters who don't belong to a major party are less likely to turn out, too.
The House is trying to create a double standard. It wants to require 60 percent of the vote to pass future citizen petitions, but only 50 percent of the vote to pass ideas put on the ballot by the Legislature.
Both chambers want the Florida Supreme Court to have the power to kick almost every citizen idea off the ballot in the first place. Remember, this is the same Legislature that's always griping about "activist" judges.
Heck, where to start?
Let's start with the election date.
This scheme of using Aug. 31 to take away the citizens' power, and not a fair-and-square general election, is something that only a banana republic would try.
It is a clammy-clawed scheme. It is puny. It is dishonest. It is sleazy. It is arrogant.
In other words, it is something that 34 of Florida's 40 state senators liked. The House, to its credit, might not go along.
Why August? First, they want to rush through the changes in August, so any new rules would apply to any citizen ideas that made the November ballot at the last minute.
Second, there is some hope in Tallahassee that it will be easier to hoodwink citizens into giving up their power in August, when fewer citizens are voting.
Here's mostly who votes in the Aug. 31 party primary: Democrats and Republicans. Yes, there are nonparty races, but the real election is in November.
I hope this backfires on the Legislature. Remember that Florida no longer has runoff elections in a party primary.
Remember, too, that Florida now has a "semi-open" primary. When all the candidates in a race are in the same party, everybody else gets to vote in that party's primary, too. Democrats, Republicans, Greens, indys.
So if the Legislature wants to have a lot of independent-minded, ticked-off voters turning out in August to mess up their party's primary elections, then they should choose Aug. 31.
Okay, next, there's this 60 percent thing.
At least the Senate wants 60 percent across the board, to pass all amendments, no matter whose idea they are.
But the House has this bizarre scheme in which citizen ideas need 60 percent to pass, compared to only 50 percent for the Legislature's ideas. I almost wish they'd try it, just for the fun of seeing that 80 percent "no" vote.
Finally, both the Senate and House have plans for having the Florida Supreme Court kill most citizen ideas before they reach the ballot. The toughest idea is in the House. Nothing - nothing - that could otherwise be passed by the Legislature as a law could be the subject of a citizen petition.
By the House's own reckoning, only two citizen petitions in the past 26 years, out of the 20 that made the ballot, would have survived: term limits and a cap on government revenue. All the rest, no matter how much the people wanted them, never would have been heard.
Two in 26 years!
No matter how many bogus opinion polls the Chamber of Commerce cites, and no matter how many claims the Legislature makes about a process "gone wild," there is no way the people of Florida will approve anything so brutally restrictive.
Tuesday: The actual merits (or demerits).