Deciding to let the people decide

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Ronnie Ellis

February 19, 2012

By Ronnie Ellis CNHI News Service The Richmond Register Sun Feb 19, 2012, 10:00 AM EST

Frankfort — “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

H.L. Mencken — Journalist, essayist, cynic and satirist

FRANKFORT — Gov. Steve Beshear and proponents of expanded gambling apparently don’t share H.L. Mencken’s cynicism when they say, “It’s time to let the people decide.”

At the press conference where Beshear and Sen. Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, unveiled their constitutional amendment on expanded gambling, Sen. R.J. Palmer, D-Winchester, said the issue is not “whether or not we need expanded gaming in Kentucky.” The real issue is “that we want the people of Kentucky to have their say.”

Of course what the people are being asked to decide is precisely what Palmer, Thayer and Beshear said isn’t the issue: Should we have expanded gambling?

But, every speaker that day made the same case: “Let the people decide.”

Some opponents, notably Senate President David Williams, argue plausibly that Kentucky is not a referendum state, and the constitution says voting for an amendment indicates the lawmaker approves of it and asks the people to ratify his or her decision.

For most people, however, that is a distinction without difference and letting the people decide is fundamental to their concept of democracy, even in a representative democracy.

That’s the only explanation for polling that says many who oppose gambling want a vote, even if the same polling says gambling will likely pass.

It is good marketing, and it gives political cover to conflicted or nervous lawmakers who can say they are “personally opposed to gambling” but voters want to decide the issue.

So it’s good strategy for proponents.

But isn’t there more than a little evidence that we, the people, don’t always make good decisions? Voters openly acknowledge they’ve made some bad decisions.

During my life, we’ve elected two presidents who faced impeachment and governors who left office in disgrace.

Congress has an approval rate around 10 percent. No one seems very satisfied with the government we’ve chosen. Some want term limits, presumably to protect us from ourselves and our own decisions. I guess it’s also why candidates often run against government while asking to be part of government.

None of this is to argue for or against gambling. My suspicion is that it won’t solve Kentucky’s problems and won’t make them much worse. (How could it?)

Expanded gambling in the form of casinos isn’t likely to turn the commonwealth into either Sodom and Gomorrah or the Silicon Valley.

But, I’m intrigued by the call to let the people decide rather than the representatives the same people have already decided to send to Frankfort — presumably to make such decisions.

Of course those are the lawmakers who decided to give us huge unfunded liabilities in state employee pension funds; persuaded us to approve annual sessions in order to reduce the number of special sessions and then regularly have been called into special session, sometimes because they couldn’t pass a budget.

They’re the same people who won’t confront controversial issues until the filing deadline passes and can’t craft a logical and constitutional plan to draw legislative districts.

In fact, several of those districts were deliberately drawn simply to contravene the people’s decisions about who they wanted to represent them in Frankfort.

Clearly people simply don’t trust those they’ve sent to Frankfort and prefer to make their own decisions.

But, I’m not yet as cynical as Mencken.

Instead I recall Winston Churchill’s quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all those others that have been tried.”

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.

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