Here in Texas, every odd-numbered year, the Texas voters have the dubious pleasure of amending our state Constitution, a document which has been amended somewhere between one thousand and one googolplex since its semi-legal ratification in 1876. You'd think that, at some point, our noble solons would decide that, after Herculean effort, they'd finally gotten it right, or barring that, that they'd throw out the whole thing and start over, but no, that would make too much sense.
Instead, every alternate year, when the Legislature passes laws that would violate the state Constitution, they send proposed amendments to the people so that all these laws can be made to pass muster. This is sort of like, oh, writing a hot check, then rushing a deposit into the bank via mail, and hoping the money hits your account before the check clears. Unfortunately nobody charges bounced-check fees on the Legislature.
Constitutional amendment elections, falling as they do in September of odd numbered years, rather than in November of even-numbered years, tend to have slightly lower than average voter turnouts, on the order of twelve percent. That's not twelve percent lower, that's twelve percent period. (Actually that's being optimistic- in 2001, the last time we did this, it was only nine percent.)
Of course it's easy to understand the low turnout, since voters usually have no idea what they would be voting -for.- Even in today's web-site driven political system, it takes a lot of digging to find the actual content of the proposed new laws; if you don't surf the Net, it's just plain impossible. Voters have to rely, instead, on the fifty-words-or-less description given the proposals on the ballot, which quite often have little or no resemblance to what the proposed amendment actually does.
Here's an example: in the 2001 amendment election, one item was billed as forever prohibiting the imposition of a property tax on travel trailers- you know, Airstreams, RVs, etc. It passed overwhelmingly. Imagine the rude awakening when, a few days after the election, it was announced that the new law actually -imposed- a tax on travel trailers which had NEVER EXISTED in the first place.
You'd think that this would have caused some movement for reform, or something, but no; there are twenty-two proposed changes this year, and some of them are just as deceptive as the 'trailer tax repeal.' One of them, listed as 'providing for parks and recreational facilities' is actually a statewide bond issue. Another one, claiming to authorize wineries in Texas, actually puts currently legal wineries in Texas under a brand-new bureaucratic oversight commission.
I recently wrote an article for the Libertarian Party of Texas' newsletter, describing which was the Libertarian way to vote on which of these twenty-two items. For those who don't know, the Libertarian Party is America's third largest political party, after the Republicans and Democrats. This is rather like saying Andorra is the third largest nation on the Iberian peninsula- a comparison made even more appropriate considering how few Americans know where Andorra is or which peninsula the Iberian is. (Hint: Andorra's between France and Spain.)
A friend of mine once said that the Libertarians were more fond than most of political discussions and less fond than most of political success. Now this seemed kind of harsh to me until I began to see reactions to my article, which was distributed electronically before the hardcopy newsletter was mailed out.
One item out of the twenty-two is a move to reduce juries in certain minor cases from twelve members to six. I'm lukewarm on this particular item, but the Libertarian Party platform specifically opposes forced jury service, so I wrote in my article that we, as a party, should support this move because it effectively reduced the burden of jury service by, well, six people per panel.
Bad move. Several people pointed out at once that a twelve-person standard was inviolable, and that reducing the pool amounted to jury-stacking. Of course, the platform doesn't mention jury stacking at all, nor does it say that the Libertarian Party regards the twelve-man guideline as holy writ, but of course it's the principle of the thing. One person even pointed out that we should support the Fully Informed Jury Act- that's legalized jury nullification- which, unfortunately, was -not- one of the twenty-two items I had to write about.
Another item on the ballot would cap property taxes for the elderly for the rest of their lives. Libertarians hate all taxes, so I thought that any law that limited government's power to tax would be a slam dunk, right? Nope. Wishful thinking. Instead, the response was, "Why give someone special treatment? We shouldn't support anything except total repeal of the property tax!"
Now, it would be nice if the property tax were repealed, but such a proposal is not on the ballot in September, and it isn't likely to be for a good long time. In the meantime, we have this proposal that would cap old folks' taxes and prevent them from going any higher. If we oppose it, it looks like the Libertarian Party supports higher taxes for old folks- NOT the kind of stance a tiny struggling party wants to take. And we have to have a position. We're a political party. Political parties take stands. Right?
Apparently not. At present, the state party leadership is taking a straw poll to see who agrees or disagrees with my article. This is what is known, in some circles, as a vote of no confidence. The state chair is staying entirely out of the thing- apparently he has better things to do than guide the course of our party in uncertain times. Perhaps his guppies need watering.
One final note: I received my copy of the newsletter today; all six pages of it. The first two pages are a regional Libertarian newsletter, Gulf Coast Liberty (Houston area), about half of which is a press release I wrote about a local bond election coming up at the same time as the amendments election. Of the remaining four pages of the newsletter, about two pages of the material is my article. One whole page is nothing but the mailing addresses and calendar of events. Between my two articles, it seems like I damn near wrote the whole newsletter this issue.
That's politics for you; nobody can waste a word when there's work to be done, but once the work's done everybody's ready to tell you what you did wrong. That, more than anything else, tells me that my party, the Libertarians, are a -real- political party.
This page last updated August 30, 2003.