Evers’s Direct Democracy Initiative Should Go Directly to the Waste Bin

Evers Pushes for Direct Democracy

That Tony Evers, boy oh boy, he’s a champ for democracy, isn’t he?

Like other caped Democrats, he’s always flitting around yelling “Save Democracy,” and this week he’s doing it again with a dusted-off and previously rejected pitch for direct ballot initiatives.

Republican leaders have indicated it will be rejected again, and rightly so.

To understand why his proposal should hit the circular file requires an understanding of how Democrats define democracy. It’s pretty straightforward: Democracy is what a majority of progressives want, attained by any means at hand. Preferably that would be through a compliant bureaucracy and through an even more compliant legislature, all backed up by compliant courts.

And so, during the pandemic, democracy came to mean the administration’s unchallenged authority to shutter schools, to mask and confine the people, to close churches and businesses, to mandate vaccines, and to divide us between essential and nonessential people.

For a while there, people were indeed “safer at home” because the governor and his administration were threatening to lock you up if you left. So were some Republicans, and you know who you are.

The Democrats argued—without any evidence and with credible scientists (including one who will now be running the National Institutes of Health) arguing otherwise—that a complete lockdown would eradicate the virus quickly, and so the people they had imprisoned would be freed sooner rather than later. In other words, tyranny today leads to freedom tomorrow, but only so long as everyone makes sure to do as they are told.

They think the same way about censorship—they are shutting us up today so we can be free to toe the line tomorrow, once no one can access dangerous disinformation to the contrary.

Never mind that the ability to impose any kind of tyranny belies the existence of democracy in the first place. That’s especially so in times of emergency, as Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Rebecca Bradley so astutely pointed out in 2020, quoting long-established case law: “The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the states were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.”

Left unchallenged, the ability of the government to infringe our liberties for even a second sends democracy spiraling toward totalitarianism: Civil liberties delayed is civil liberties denied, to paraphrase a saying. Fortunately, back then, the governor had neither a compliant court nor a compliant legislature and so his vision of democracy—tyranny to preserve freedom, killing democracy to save it—was challenged and overturned.

Since then, he has attained a compliant court majority and, predictably, four justices have gone on a judicial law-making spree that would make Earl Warren blush.

This is another feature of progressive democracy: Experts, either on the bench or in the bureaucracies, know better than you do what you want and need. They also know better than the elected Legislature. As such, their decisions are truly democratic, even if you don’t know it yet. They are giving you the policies you would want if only you weren’t crazy or stupid or “far right.”

And so the state’s Supreme Court has reinstated ballot drop boxes, embraced progressive gerrymandering, and thrown out Act 10’s elimination of collective bargaining for general employees. Progressives immediately called the Act 10 decision a massive win for Wisconsin—even though the law has saved taxpayers billions of dollars—in much the same way as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul proclaimed New York City’s new congestion tolling, which slaps commuters entering parts of Manhattan with a $9 toll, as a massive win for commuters.

We’re all massive winners, we just don’t know it yet. They are doing all this for our own good, for democracy’s sake, and we’d better not question it.

This is Real Democracy, Seriously, I’m Not Kidding …

Now this week, Evers is back with another plan to save democracy, which apparently still needs saving because, while the governor might have a compliant high court, the legislature is still full of heretics who are brazenly defying their constituents, even though those constituents keep electing them.

So this past week the governor said he wants the voters of Wisconsin to be able to put direct binding referenda initiatives on statewide ballots without legislative approval, which he says would enable Wisconsinites to enact statutory and constitutional changes through a majority vote.

This is not the first time Evers has promoted a direct legislation agenda. In 2022, he proposed creating a statewide binding referendum process and called a special session of the legislature to make it happen, primarily as a way to repeal Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Republicans didn’t fall for the deep fake and gaveled the special session in and out in less than a minute.

Still, with this gambit Evers is beaming because, well, this version of saving democracy doesn’t require dressing up and parading around in Emperors’ clothing. There’s no hiding behind bureaucratic wisdom and judicial telepathy to discern what the people want. There’s no locking you up when you want to be free and then having to explain how that’s good for democracy.

This time, the governor assures us, it’s a shot of freedom, straight-up.

“The will of the people should be the law of the land,” Evers said. “Republican lawmakers have repeatedly worked to put constitutional amendments on the ballot that Republicans drafted, and Republicans passed, all while Republicans refuse to give that same power to the people of Wisconsin. And that’s wrong.”

Just why is that wrong? The governor doesn’t say, but it seems to me he just defined representative democracy and then trashed it as undesirable, if not immoral.

Not surprisingly, the issues Evers says can be settled through citizen-initiated binding referenda and that are supported by a majority of voters is a Who’s Who list of progressive causes: legalizing and taxing marijuana, restoring Roe v Wade, expanding BadgerCare, and enacting “common-sense gun safety reform policies,” meaning red flag laws whereby the government can confiscate your guns without due process, among others.

Evers says he simply wants the people to say what they want about those issues themselves at the ballot box, and what on earth could be wrong with that?

Well, plenty, as it turns out.

Take a Left, Go Straight to Tyranny

The first is the logical inconsistency. Evers wants the voters to bypass the legislature for doing the job the voters elected them to do. The governor obviously doesn’t trust the decisions the voters have made in selecting their representatives—they are, after all, crazy or stupid or far-right, or all three—but he’s more than willing to trust the decisions they will make on the spur of the moment about specific issues.

Of course, that’s the difference between liking representative democracy and liking so-called direct democracy, the latter otherwise known as the most direct route to tyranny one can imagine. To say it another way, if bureaucratic collectivism is the equivalent of swallowing an opioid, then direct democracy is a mainline injection.

It’s in fact another deception, a Trojan horse, an aggressive attempt to gaslight us to think progressives are benevolent, freedom-loving, and interested in social justice. They care about none of the above, and “direct legislation” is a perfect example.

It tosses stability and deliberation out of the window. It collapses the system of checks and balances. It elevates the most extreme and radical formulations of statutes and amendments. It sacrifices the civic interests of minorities for the special interests of the elite. In sum, direct democracy short-circuits the interests of the whole for the prerogatives of what James Madison called “factious majorities.”

That progressives say that direct democracy is more “democratic” than representative democracy should tell us that the opposite is true. Again, these are the people who told us that Covid lockdowns offered a quick route to freedom (two weeks to flatten the curve!), that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, and that white supremacy is the number one terrorist threat in the U.S.

Oh, and boys can be girls and girls can be boys any time they so choose.

Saving Democracy is Big Business

In 1985, in one of the best contemporary critiques of modern direct democracy, David Magleby of Brigham Young University wrote “Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States,” in which he convincingly established, whether he wanted to or not, that direct democracy is not the most democratic policymaking mechanism, and for any number of reasons.

For one thing, there emerges in special referendum elections what Magleby calls the “initiative industry.” In other words, high-spending special interest groups—many of which hail from outside the state or relevant jurisdiction—spend millions of dollars to influence and shape single-issue elections. Just look at our own Supreme Court elections, in which candidates are often stand-ins for specific issue propositions, as in 2023, and you can see what I mean.

Or take a look-see at California. Direct democracy has helped to make that state the nightmare it is today: In just one year starting with the fall general election of 2020, special interests spent $1.1 billion on statewide direct democracy measures, most of which came from big corporations, which is ironic because progressives originally pushed direct democracy as an antidote to corporate domination of state governments.

These days when Californians vote, they have to navigate as many as 11 or 12 ballot initiatives in any given election, from measures that actually restrict democracy to banning cable TV. That’s right, in 1964 a measure driven by the ad and movie theater industries successfully got a proposition passed with 66 percent of the vote to ban cable TV and other home TV subscription services. It was quickly found to be unconstitutional.

People apparently liked the deceptive slogan, “Save Free TV,” which was distributed using millions of dollars in ads. Today’s equivalent slogan is “Save Democracy,” and it’s about as veracious as “Save Free TV.”

This is what you get when you let direct democracy settle into the political neighborhood.

As Magleby pointed out, special interests devour ballot proposition campaigns, both on the left and the right. Narrow special-interest groups have the money and organizing clout to write ballot measures and to get enough signatures to get their preferred language on the ballot, almost always ensuring that the most extreme and unedited positions on any issue are the ones that triumph.

In such campaigns, there is no deliberation, in the broader sense of the term. The conversation is all one-way, Magleby observed—expensive ads opposing or supporting the measure bombard the electorate, influencing and shaping public opinion in the heat of the moment. Ballot measures cannot hold town halls, like candidates can. Ballot measures cannot debate each other, though human stand-ins might feebly try.

Ballot propositions collapse all safeguards of the checks and balances system, funneling everything down into one quick and potentially impulsive decision. Not so in representative government, where voters space their candidate choices—and thus their policy preferences—over multiple years, choosing an Assembly representative every two years, and a state senator and a governor every four years.

In representative government, too, there is committee work drafting and redrafting bills after conversations and comments from voters and stakeholders; there is deliberation and debate, the threats of a gubernatorial veto, there are public hearings and amendments and compromise. Most important, there is time for passions to calm down and for cooler heads to prevail.

The very representative scheme preserves safeguards against decisions made on a whim. It doesn’t fall prey to slick slogans like “Save Free TV” and “Save Democracy.” And, in the end, voters can always boot their elected representatives out of office.

There is another consideration. In ballot propositions, voters are laser focused on one issue and one issue only, perhaps blown completely out of proportion compared to the matrix of issues facing the state overall. Generally speaking, voters elect their representatives based on the whole of their political cache, on an array of issues, not on any single issue. Voters are forced to decide how much priority to assign any single issue and in doing so avoid the unintended consequences that often occur when they are free to obsess on just one matter.

Sometimes, voters do boot candidates out of office on the basis of a single issue. But even in those cases, the vote to oust the incumbent—or to recall the incumbent, if criminality is involved—is effectively a ballot proposition in itself. In fact, it’s the most effective ballot proposition there can be because the voter is not given the luxury of ignoring all the attendant consequences of that vote.

Representative government is far from perfect. It suffers the same flaws as that of any human enterprise, but that is also its strength. It requires legislation to be shepherded one step at a time, past guardrails and checkpoints, though a public process with speed bumps along the way. Not so with direct legislation.

It’s the difference between letting the pilots finish their check list with the control tower or simply taking off when the passengers get restless and angry. More often than not, the results are going to be worse in the latter case.

All that said, there can be a case of some sort for voter-initiated ballot propositions, if strict constitutional criteria are attached and if lawmakers decide that is what their constituents want. For example, as some have suggested, ballot propositions could be required to gain supermajorities to pass. Or they could be advisory only rather than binding, and then let legislators ignore the outcomes at their own risks. In addition, Magleby suggested giving voters a tiered range of choices on non-binding propositions, such as “agree strongly” or “agree somewhat.”

Then, too, such propositions could be limited to the enactment of statutes, while the constitutional amendment process—which already gives voters the ratification decision—would remain as it is. To avoid frivolous propositions, signature thresholds would have to be robust, and ballot propositions could be limited to November general elections to ensure widespread participation.

An Impulse of Passion

In the end, though, it’s best just to leave our representative government right where it is—in the hands of elected lawmakers. Democratic governance of any type must always fend off a natural slide toward tyranny, and direct democracy, with its lack of filters, especially so.

Our Founding Fathers—and in particular James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—opined frequently about the differences between the two. Madison despaired the idea of what he called “pure democracy.”

It was beset by factions, Madison wrote in The Federalist Number 10, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Pure democracies, he wrote, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

In a direct democracy, powerful minorities can quickly become factious majorities through the the exercise of their resources, not to mention of the “common impulse of passion.” A tyranny of the majority is not far behind. Madison much preferred a government in which there is a “scheme of representation.”

Jefferson was a bit more lenient when it came to direct democracy, but even he acknowledged that it had to be limited to government small in scale.

“Such a government is evidently restrained to very narrow limits of space and population,” Jefferson wrote to John Taylor in 1816. “I doubt if it would be practicable beyond the extent of a New England township.”

In Wisconsin today, cities, villages, towns and school districts have direct democracy powers, and that is where those powers should stay.

When someone says something is too good to be true, it usually is. When someone says they are doing something for your own good, more likely than not they are not. And when progressives tell you they are going to let voters do some impulse shopping to redecorate the constitution, don’t expect things to turn out well.

Whether the slogan is Save Free TV or Save Democracy, it seems direct democracy is always about saving something. In the end, though, about the only things that are ever saved are the perks and prerequisites of the ruling class.

Here’s a slogan: Save representative democracy—and the people’s true power—instead.