Initiatives and referendums

Constitutional Analysis:
Initiatives and referendums are unconstitutional. Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States states, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,…” Every law ever created in Arizona under this system is actually unconstitutional.

The duty of the citizen in the area of legislation is on the twelve man jury. At that point citizens may say guilty or not guilty based on if they agree with the law, not based on whether or not the person broke the law. And by the way you are supposed to have a jury of twelve of your peers in every court trial and civil suit totaling more than $20. You may also sue to get a law ruled unconstitutional.

Initiatives and referendums are part of a democracy which was specifically excluded by the Constitution guaranteeing a Republic. They are an important part of the Manifesto of the Communist Party installed during the Woodrow Wilson administration. That should give you some warning.

As Elihu Root noted in 1913, “The affairs with which statutes have to deal as a rule involve the working of a great number and variety of motives incident to human nature, and the working of those motives depends upon complicated and often obscure facts of production, trade, social life, with which men generally are not familiar and which require study and investigation to understand. Thrusting a rigid prohibition or command into the operation of these forces is apt to produce quite unexpected and unintended results.”

In his Experiments in Government, he also wrote, “The Initiative and Compulsory Referendum are attempts to cure the evils which have developed in our practice of representative government by means of a return to the old, unsuccessful, and discarded method of direct legislation and by rehabilitating one of the most impracticable of Rousseau’s theories.” He added in error, “…but it is not necessary to assume that their trial will be destructive of our system of government.”

The damage caused by the use of these devices is that it ties the hands of the legislature to reduce debt, drives taxes up and keeps the poor poor. Since they are not likely to go away anytime soon, however, we recommend that you consider these carefully. Most notably, are they going to raise your taxes.

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