Tony Evers, Anti-Constitutionalist

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers loves democracy, can’t get enough of it in fact. He just doesn’t know how it works. In a press conference recorded on Friday and released Monday as the new State Legislature was being sworn in, Evers announced that he would include in his upcoming budget proposal a provision that would allow members of the public to introduce statewide ballot initiatives.

“Since I took office, Republican legislators have repeatedly ignored the will of the people of Wisconsin, a majority of whom support proposals like restoring Roe [v. Wade] and access to safe, legal abortion, legalizing and taxing marijuana like we do alcohol, funding our public schools, and instituting commonsense gun safety reform, among many other issues,” he said.

None of these has even a remote chance of passing the Republican-controlled Legislature, so Evers is demanding that the Republican-controlled Legislature be removed from the process altogether. His proposal would allow any member of the public to circulate petitions on a binding statewide referendum. If a certain number of signatures is collected, the question is put on the ballot in the next statewide election, where a majority vote will enact it.

To Evers, this is no different than Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment process, which the Legislature has used with increasing frequency in the past few years.

“Republican lawmakers have repeatedly worked to put constitutional amendments on the ballot that Republicans drafted [and] Republicans pass, all while Republicans refuse to give that same power to the people that we serve,” Evers said. “That’s wrong. Republican lawmakers shouldn’t be able to ignore the will of the people and then prevent the people from having a voice when their legislators fail to listen. We have to change that.”

Does…does Evers not know how the constitutional amendment process works? The people DO have a voice, in a statewide referendum no less! A proposed constitutional amendment must be introduced in the Legislature and pass both houses in two consecutive legislative sessions. If it does, it is then placed on the ballot in the next statewide election.

Evers believes this is unfair, however, because the people don’t have the same ability to draft ballot questions that elected legislators do.

“If Republican lawmakers are going to continue to try and legislate by constitutional amendment, then they should give Wisconsinites the same opportunity that 26 other states have,” he explained. “It’s that simple: The Legislature should give the people that same power, too.”

It is not at all that simple, and giving the people legislative power is antithetical to America’s founding principles. The U.S. Constitution’s framers despised this sort of direct democracy, as they feared that it would empower a “tyranny of the majority.”

In a speech to New York’s constitutional ratifying convention in 1788, Alexander Hamilton noted that while “it has been observed…that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

James Madison, the Constitution’s primary author, concurred, writing in Federalist No. 10 that “a pure Democracy, by which I mean a Society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual.”

In other words, government by majority rule is destined to fail because it is forever susceptible to the whims of a fickle public.

“Such Democracies,” Madison noted, “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.”

Madison and Hamilton were fierce ideological opponents who both nonetheless recognized that the sort of government Evers is proposing and that 26 states have sadly enacted, is a unable to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens. If anyone can serve as a legislator by introducing legislation, then the elected legislatures are rendered meaningless.

That bills often die in legislatures is the point; America’s framers wanted to make laws difficult to pass. If they were not, then the very fabric of society would be altered constantly by perpetually shifting political winds.

The constitutional amendment process is thus a perfect compromise, as it allows for a modicum of direct democracy while ensuring that any profound governmental or cultural shift is actually supported by the people, not just 50 percent of them plus one voter.

Much smarter men than Tony Evers recognized this, and it should come as no surprise that he does not.