EDITORIAL: Kill bill: Protect ballot initiative option

Here we go again.

Stung by groups defending the constitutionally protected ballot initiative right of citizens, Idaho legislators are regurgitating their reflexive power grab. This time, it’s in the form of a bill presented by Hayden Sen. Doug Okuniewicz.

When the Legislature enacts a law that the people don’t like or ignores something the people really want, an already challenging process allows citizens to essentially bypass their representatives to get ‘er done. It's done through an initiative to get the issue on a ballot so the people can decide.

A shining example was the Medicaid expansion ballot initiative of 2018. After legislators steadfastly refused to extend Medicaid benefits to more lower-income citizens — essentially, the state’s working poor — a statewide grassroots effort got the question on the ballot. And guess what? More than 60% of voters disagreed with their elected officials and overwhelmingly supported Medicaid expansion.

Efforts to ignore the people’s will and kill the ballot initiative option have ensued. The weapon of math destruction: Set the signature-collecting bar so high and make the process so mathematically arduous that it’s nearly impossible to ever get an issue before voters.

Legislators apparently think they always know best, no matter what a majority of citizens told them five years ago, what a unanimous Idaho Supreme Court told them two years ago — that the Legislature couldn’t take the ballot initiative right away from citizens — or even what experts are telling them now. Just days ago, legislators learned that eliminating the voter-approved Medicaid expansion would cost taxpayers $78 million more because of the loss of federal dollars.

But that data hasn’t put a dent in this latest attempt to ensure that measures like Medicaid expansion never see an Idaho dawn again. The latest bill would ask voters to decide if the state constitution should be altered to allow the stricter requirements on ballot initiatives that the Supreme Court shot down two years ago.

Here’s hoping citizen-centric legislators will resist this latest power grab, being satisfied with last session’s successful move to call themselves into session whenever they feel like it — a power that previously had belonged only to the governor.

Any attempt to reduce the people’s rights to influence the laws that impact their lives is antithetical to the good old Republican platform of smaller government. Giving the Legislature even more power than it already has is nothing more than a win for Big Government.