Evan Barrett: GOP and business groups stifling voters’ voice

Our 1889 and 1972 Constitutions clearly place the people above the legislature, both with opening words “We the people…” They don’t start with “We, the Legislature” or “We, the business lobby.” Here the people are supposed to be supreme.

Our Constitution’s rights and protections often protect the people from governmental overreach. But, “feeling their oats,” the GOP legislative supermajority has advanced dozens of bills that empower the Legislature at the expense of our system of checks and balances and at the direct expense of the people. SB 93 is one of those bills.

In 1906, supported by 84.6% of the voters, the “people reserve[d] to themselves power to propose laws …” The 1972 Constitution states that, separate from the senate and house of representatives, the “people reserve to themselves the powers of initiative and referendum.”

This supreme power of the people in the Constitution cannot be usurped by the Legislature no matter how large a majority a single political party might accumulate.

And, beyond the Legislature interfering with the people’s initiative right, it is patently obvious that no special legislative privilege is constitutionally given to business organizations who happen to have the financial resources to become a lobbying force in the state capitol advancing their financial interests. Among the reasons our Constitution was rewritten in 1972 was to remove the 83-year Copper Collar of business domination from our governmental processes. But in 2021 the Montana Chamber of Commerce, two local chambers and eleven business lobbying groups, calling these efforts “modernizing the ballot measure process,” took Montana backwards towards the business dominance of the “Copper Collar” of Montana’s past, granting the “business lobby” a special privilege that no other Montana group has. As brazenly prepared by special interest lobbyists and in contravention of the power of the people to propose specific legislative language by initiative, the state government was directed by 2021’s HB 651 to add a “business impact warning” onto the ballot language considered by voters. That kind of warning right has not been given to workers, to children, to families — to anyone but “business.”

Now, in 2023, SB 93 expands that assault on the voice of the people by requiring citizens to pay a non-refundable $3700 to the state just for proposing an initiative, definitely an effort to constrain the citizen-based advocacy outlined so clearly in our Constitution.

Those HB 651/SB 93 changes also target the process by which Montana citizens write the language of the law they are proposing to be a ballot issue and the petition on which they will seek signatures. The GOP and business interests, having failed to defeat many citizen initiatives with electors, are now seeking ways to prevent initiatives from ever reaching the ballot and to impose their interpretation of initiatives over the way the initiatives are prepared by the people.

Attempting sweeping intrusions of cost and control over the process by which ballot issues make the ballot to be presented for a vote by electors, the GOP and business interests are empowering themselves. In addition to the “business warning” and the $3700 filing fee, they allow an initiative to be outright vetoed by the Attorney General. Further, the AG or even interim legislative committees can add their language to the peoples’ initiative.

Tell your legislators to vote against SB 93 stifling the voice of the people, or, in Montana, “we the people” will no longer be supreme.