Voters in a state giving a megalomaniacal masher like Donald Trump a 21-point lead in the latest presidential poll should not be writing constitutional law.
So it's always good when the Arkansas Supreme Court throws a proposed constitutional amendment off the ballot, as happened Thursday to the casino monopoly and nursing-home liability protection proposals.
To be precise: Both of those will appear on the ballot, because the printing is done. Votes just won't be counted. Thank heaven.
I'd say that even if I favored a proposed amendment that got thrown off. It's the principle of the thing.
For that matter, and by that principle, voters in a Trump-rejecting state--say, California--shouldn't be writing state constitutional law either. California's ballot initiatives have proven even more destructive than ours.
So I'm not insulting Trump voters. I'm insulting all voters.
As it happens, I abhorred the casino monopoly proposal, by which two jokers in Missouri were trying to write their companies into our Constitution. And I happened to have objected to the nursing-home protection proposal on the premise that no group should be exempt from the full range of jury options in lawsuits against anybody else.
On both proposals, as you perhaps notice, people were trying to write special opportunities or immunities for themselves into a state constitution that ought to emulate our glorious national one as a statement of ennobling general principles.
A constitution should not exist as a cluttered collection of narrow special-interest language available only to those with a lot of nerve as well as the money to hire petition canvassers and political consultants, and air television commercials.
Constitutions should be written by wise founding fathers, not medical-malpractice fretters and would-be casino monopolists.
Yes, sometimes constitutions need to be changed. Ours in Arkansas needs total rewriting, for that matter, though not by nursing homes or would-be casino monopolists.
Amendments should be proposed only in an arduous way closely resembling the federal process. That's by overwhelming referral via a super-majority of the legislative branch to then be approved only by super-majority support from voters or voters' elected agents, such as county quorum courts.
A state that allows its constitution to be easily accessed is prostituting itself.
Absent a new state constitution or a more restrictive process of amending it--which would itself require an amendment, one Trump-caliber voters would resist if they understood that direct power was being taken from them--then we must rely on the process that was concluded Thursday.
It is one by which opponents of proposed amendments, not wanting to take chances with voters, hire lawyers to file direct appeals to the state Supreme Court. They argue that the ballot titles that voters will see fail to give them enough information, or present that information clearly enough, to facilitate a properly reasoned vote.
Associate Justice Karen Baker, writing the majority opinion throwing out the casino amendment, observed that the ballot title presumed to provide that sports-event wagering would be allowed by these new monopoly casinos although sports-event wagering is illegal by federal law in the state. Then she concluded the voter would be confronting something invalid in the ballot title without being told as much.
In the other case, on nursing-home medical liability, Associate Justice Paul Danielson wrote: "It has long been regarded as axiomatic [meaning self-evident] that the majority of voters, when called upon to vote for or against a proposed measure, will derive their information about its contents from an inspection of the ballot title immediately before exercising the right of suffrage."
Really? Well, then, I rest my case.
Do you mean to tell me that some old boy would go to vote--for Trump, I suspect--and be wholly unaware that he'd also be confronted by proposed amendments to his state Constitution? And that all of sudden he'd say to himself, "Look here. This is something about casinos. Boy, I like them. And look here. This is something about medical liability. Boy, I'm against that. And look here--there's a bunch of writin' down here below both of 'em. Oh, hell, I knew I should've brought my glasses."
Perhaps he brought to the polling place the tool that the pedestrian constitutional law-writer in Arkansas really needs. By that I mean a coin to flip.
In closing, I must admit I will vote for a publicly initiated amendment cleared for the ballot to legalize medical marijuana.
But I still argue that, in the noble federal style, it should have been harder to get that proposal on the ballot, and that something exceeding a simple majority vote should be required to affix it to the state Constitution.
A constitution is serious business, even if we don't take ours seriously.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/16/2016