Twelve Ways to Save Democracy in Wisconsin by Matthew Rothschild

Author:Matthew Rothschild [Rothschild, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299334987
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

chapter 7

Give Us Direct Democracy

It’s early February 2011. Governor Scott Walker has just “dropped a bomb,” to use his inelegant phrase: he’s announced his intention to gut public sector unionism in Wisconsin with Act 10. In response, huge numbers of protesters are amassing at the Capitol Square. On subsequent weekends, the numbers reach one hundred thousand or more. And thousands fill the capitol itself and engage in a sleep-in that lasts three weeks. Eventually, the Capitol Police clear the capitol, and the leaders of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the state’s biggest labor unions channel the energy of the protests into a move to recall Republican state senators, along with Walker.

Walker won his war against organized labor in Wisconsin, and he set an example for other Republican governors. Ohio governor John Kasich copied Walker’s effort on March 31, 2011. Again, there were massive protests in that state’s capitol. But in Ohio, the outcome was different because the citizens of Ohio had a swifter remedy than the recall: the Ohio Constitution allows citizens, by referendum, to veto a bill that the legislature and the governor have passed. Organizers got more than triple the number of signatures needed to put it on the ballot in November, and the voters of Ohio rejected the law by a whopping 62–38 margin.

So why couldn’t Wisconsinites have used the same remedy?

Because, oddly, Wisconsin’s constitution does not allow for binding referendums initiated by the citizenry. I say “oddly” because Wisconsin, under Fighting Bob La Follette, led the way in one progressive reform after another to empower voters, including having the voters—and not the party bosses—vote on who the candidates should be.

Progressives actually did champion the idea of the citizen initiative and referendum. Here is governor Francis McGovern in his 1911 message to the legislature: “The great task of the time is how to make and keep the government really representative of the people. The initiative [and] the referendum . . . have been proposed as effective means for accomplishing this result,” he said, adding that they “embody but one idea: that of placing the people in actual control of public affairs.”

The voters of Wisconsin had an opportunity to amend the Wisconsin Constitution and grant themselves the powers of initiative and referendum. “In November 1914, the legislature placed on the ballot a constitutional amendment which would have given Wisconsin electors the initiative for constitutional amendments and state laws and would also have enabled voters to petition that a law already passed be submitted to a referendum vote before taking effect,” a report by the Legislative Reference Bureau notes. But the citizens turned it down “by a vote of 148,536 to 84,934.”

So why did the voters turn it down?

I found an answer at the website of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. “After 13 years in power, the Progressives had become overconfident. In the 1913 legislature, they passed a series of big tax increases to finance an ambitious public works program, as well as giving final approval to a constitutional amendment raising their salaries.

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