At last running count, this state's basic law--its constitution--had some 90 amendments going on 100. As for just proposed amendments, there's no counting those, especially after the state's Supreme Court keeps throwing them off the ballot--or trying to. Last year, the state's high court was confronted by four proposals to change the state's essential law and ruled against letting the voters have a chance at three of them but chose to let the Medical Marijuana Act stand. If the voters were ready to have the state go to pot, the Arkansas Supreme Court was not about to stand in their way. Regnat Populus and all that. Or as the late great H. L. Mencken so memorably put it: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
But here's the catch to all that high-flying rhetoric about the American system of government being a democracy: 'Tain't so. It was set up as a representative republic so rich in checks and balances that the great god Demos wouldn't be able to convert it into just another mass democracy susceptible to all the intrigues of demagogues and would-be dictators who claimed to be pursuing the people's will but were really projecting only their own.
Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of that republic by adding still more of those vital checks and balances to the state's constitution as proposed in HJR1003, which already been endorsed by the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee; this amendment would make it much more difficult to clutter Arkansas' basic law. Sometimes you've got to scrub away all the rust before getting a ship or a kitchen or, yes, a constitution up to snuff.
HJR1003 would cover the whole crowded waterfront by applying to all proposed constitutional amendments, initiated acts and miscellaneous referendums in the never predictable future. It sounds like just the kind of spring cleaning this state's basic law needs from top to bottom.
This constitutional amendment to limit constitutional amendments would require that to get such amendments on the ballot, its proponents would have to collect signatures from at least 25 counties rather than just 15, and that both chambers of the Legislature would have to approve its wording by a two-thirds' vote instead of the simple majority now required.
What's more, in order for it to become law, We the People would have to pass such an amendment by at least 60 percent of the popular vote instead of the simple majority now required. With such a requirement in place, the vexatious Medical Marijuana Act would never have become state law; it got only 53 percent of the popular vote. It's definitely time, if not past time, to clear the decks of the good ship S.S. Arkansas and make this state's basic law ship-shape at last.
Happily, the final product of all this work would be subject to inspection: The state's attorney general would be able to review the ballot title of such a fundamental change with an eye to seeing that it's an improvement over current law, which won't be easy. HJR1003's ballot title takes up more than 1,000 words and four pages of legalese.
If approved by the Legislature, HJR1003 would cap the good start made at its session so far. Note that the Ledge has also approved a proposal to be referred to voters to limit damages and cap those onerous fees in civil cases. It's time that gold mine for the state's lawyers were shut down and its entrances tightly sealed. The Ledge would also require that voters show they're voters, not fakers, before being allowed to make law for the rest of us. No doubt constitutional challenges await all these reforms, but that's why there are judges and juries to assure the rule of law instead of providing grist for more scandals.
So anchors aweigh! No, it hasn't been smooth sailing all these years and it's unlikely to be fair weather through all the years to come. Which is how things go in any self-governing republic under the rule of law. But this Legislature deserves credit for trying to follow the first rule of good government and a good life. Henry David Thoreau summed it up as: Simplify, simplify, simplify. But it may take a lot of complicated work to make things simple, as this session of the Legislature continues to demonstrate.
Editorial on 03/23/2017