Proposed Issue 2 asks voters to concede they're less responsible than legislators.
If Issue 2 passes because voters don't pay enough attention to realize they're being insulted, then the legislative premise will be borne out.
My personal observation--a sad one, made with apologies to both groups--is that the Arkansas General Assembly is a solid microcosm of the people of the state.
Issue 2 is a legislative referral, and it is simple. It is to put in the state Constitution that proposed ballot issues--constitutional amendments or initiated acts--will be considered approved by the people only if 60 percent of them vote in approval. Currently a simple 50 percent plus one does the trick, such as on Issue 2.
Do you get the irony that it would take only a majority vote of the people to require a 60 percent vote of the people?
The legislative reasoning also is simple. It's that the people keep doing stupid stuff and must be saved from themselves.
While that's true in terms of electing those very legislators and giving electoral votes to Donald Trump, the legislative offense-taking has to do solely with voter preference on a run of recent ballot issues.
In-charge Republican legislators are aghast that the people have voted--quite understandably in terms of their self-interest--to raise their minimum wage and legalize marijuana for medical purposes, with a doctor's note, for dealing with pain, illness or cancer-treatment effects.
There is a basic rhetorical debate about Issue 2 now taking place on an insiders' level among Republican legislators and people's advocates.
Critics say Issue 2 means legislators could make a law by a simple majority while the people could not except by 60 percent. Republican legislators say that's hogwash because Issue 2 plainly says that the proposed new 60 percent threshold applies both to legislatively referred ballot issues and those qualified by public initiative and petitions.
Critics say legislators may pass bills to make laws by 50 percent plus one while voters under Issue 2 couldn't make laws except by 60 percent. Republican legislators say simple statutes are different from constitutional amendments and legislators can't amend the Constitution without a vote of the people.
Critics say laws are laws, and that, by the way, Issue 2 requires 60 percent for mere initiated acts on the ballot, which are precisely equivalent to legislative bills that can be made law by a simple majority.
Republican legislators say they must vote by three-fourths majorities to make appropriations of money. Critics say the people aren't making appropriations when they set a higher minimum wage or legalize medical marijuana or go along with four casinos in specific places. Republican legislators say the people essentially are forcing appropriations on legislators to establish casino and marijuana regulatory systems.
Decide for yourselves whom you find persuasive in all that. But consider as well whether that debate makes a darn--which it doesn't--to the point, which is that legislators don't like what the people have been doing by a majority and therefore seek to get the people to give up voting power.
Republican legislators say they merely seek to protect the people from "outside influence," presumably sinister marijuana legalizers, alien conspirators for a living wage or Joe Biden-sent carpetbaggers.
I argue that the outside influencers we should worry most about are the Trumpsters nationwide who anted up most of Sarah Sanders' millions for her gubernatorial campaign to convert the state to an insurrection outpost where real history can't be taught in schools that are deliberately pitted against each other to produce some better than others--in open defiance of equity and adequacy mandates of the state Constitution and the Lake View ruling.
Meantime, there was a newspaper endorsement the other day of Issue 2. It simply argued that a constitution shouldn't be amended willy-nilly.
It cited the U.S. Constitution, which can be amended only arduously and by state legislative votes, not people's direct votes. Congress must vote by a two-thirds majority both in the House and Senate to refer an amendment to the states, and 38 state legislatures must then approve of that proposal.
I might go for that argument if the state Constitution was as gloriously principled as the U.S. Constitution, which it isn't, and if the state would go all in on restricting the direct power of the people in the way the federal government restricts it.
That is to say Arkansas would allow the Legislature to refer proposed constitutional amendments only by two-thirds votes of the House and Senate, and then only to the 75 counties, not the people, with three-fourths of the quorum courts of those 75 counties required to vote to ratify.
We also would need to elect our governors not by popular vote, but a state electoral college in which all 75 counties get two votes equally and then varying votes based on population.
Failing any of that, the decision really comes down to whether the people choose to maintain as our state motto "regnat populus," meaning the people rule, or change that to "regnant populus my hind end."
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.