Sid Salter
- Wallace believed that Mississippi voters should have the right to bypass the Legislature and put their own stamp on changing state laws when and if the Legislature fails to be responsive.
Price was right.
When Rep. Price Wallace, the Republican state legislator representing the citizens of House District 77 in Rankin and Simpson counties, died last week, one of the primary plaudits in his obituary was his leadership in attempting to restore ballot initiative rights to Mississippi voters.
Over the last five years, Wallace was dogged in his determination to restore those rights. He believed that Mississippi voters should have the right to bypass the Legislature and put their own stamp on changing state laws when and if the Legislature fails to be responsive.
The fight for lawmaking power has ebbed and flowed through the Legislature and the state courts for over a century. The Legislature adopted an earlier initiative process in 1914. The state Supreme Court upheld it in 1917 but reversed that rule five years later in another case. The high court passed on a chance to undo that ruling in 1991.
From 1993 through 2021, Mississippians had the option to take power away from the Legislature and change the state constitution as they deemed appropriate when the Legislature refused to act. The process was called initiative and referendum, and it was neither easy nor often successful. The Legislature designed the 1992 initiative process in Mississippi to be difficult for citizens who wished to circumvent the Legislature’s power.
The House has attempted multiple times to restore some form of ballot initiative power to the voters, albeit a version that affords voters far less power than they had before the state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the state’s 1992 ballot initiative law was rendered “unworkable and inoperable” by the Legislature’s failure to amend the law to reflect the state’s loss of a congressional district after the 2000 census.
That legal challenge came after the 2020 elections when Mississippi voters approved a voter initiative authorizing a medical marijuana program outlined in Initiative 65 over the express objections of the majority of legislative leaders.
Mississippi voters gave Initiative 65 73.7% approval, while giving the legislative alternative, Initiative 65A, only 26.3% of the vote. The pro-marijuana initiative outpolled Republican incumbent President Donald Trump by some 20 percentage points with state voters.
State Supreme Court Justice Josiah Coleman wrote in that decision about the 1992 ballot initiative law: “To work in today’s reality, it will need amending – something that lies beyond the power of the Supreme Court.” The court’s overall decision was even blunter: “The reduction in Mississippi’s congressional representation renders it unworkable and inoperable on its face.”
But the fatal flaw in the 1992 ballot-initiative law was well known. Succinctly, legislative inaction on amending the 1992 ballot initiative law killed direct democracy through ballot initiative in this state, not the high court.
Oversight? Hardly. The Legislature grew increasingly concerned about the 1992 ballot-initiative laws after the 2015 elections. Initiative 42 sought to put “adequate and efficient” public school funding in the state constitution and empower the state’s chancery courts to enforce such funding. It failed, but by a tight margin.
Initiative 42 not only made it to the ballot, but it also became the defining issue in the 2015 statewide elections. From start to finish, the pro-42 effort was a well-oiled, well-financed political effort – one that provided a political roadmap to those who could put enough money and organizational muscle into a ballot initiative to thwart the will of the legislative majority.
So, there wasn’t a lot of legislative weeping when the Supreme Court ruling on the medical marijuana ballot initiative neutered the entire ballot initiative process. There is sentiment in the House to restore ballot initiative rights to state voters, with House Speaker Jason White leading the charge. But exactly how those rights are restored – or restricted – is where the process can derail. Wallace, in his post as House Constitution chair, was keenly aware of that fact. Wallace supported a process that required petitioners to gather around 140,000 signatures before it could be considered on the ballot.
Direct democracy in a representative government should be difficult. But when lawmakers return to the Capitol, they should remember Price Wallace’s efforts and find a way to restore the power of the ballot initiative to Mississippi voters in a responsible way. Price was right.
