Ballot buck stops here

Why is Gov. Hiram Johnson’s body spinning in his Colma, California, grave at a clip that makes dervishes seem lazy?

Jumping into the WayBack Machine provides several possible reasons for Johnson’s afterlife agitation. Maybe he’s bummed the Golden State has abandoned the anti-Asian-immigration and isolationist policies this “progressive” governor espoused as both California’s chief executive from 1911 to 1917 and as a U.S. senator until his death on August 6, 1945, the day Hiroshima was flattened. No irony there.

More likely, Hiram’s postmortem hyperactivity might stem from the decades-in-the-making perversion of the initiative process he helped champion.

Johnson, a Sacramento native, gave his inaugural speech in January 1911, and within 10 months he and the Legislature placed before voters Proposition 7 and Proposition 8, allowing Californians to end-run their elected representatives through use of the recall, referendum and the initiative.

Prop. 7 passed by a margin of more than 3-to-1: nearly 169,000 votes to a little more than 52,000 against. (By contrast, Prop. 4, which made California the sixth state to grant women the right to vote, was approved 125,037-121,450.)

Placing Prop. 7 on the ballot took some gargantuan political stones. It was a root hog, straight-up-the-cowcatcher slam on California’s No. 1 political puppeteer, Southern Pacific Railroad. There were other “interest groups,” but none remotely as “special” as Southern Pacific, who had anointed the most S.P. sycophantic governor for the better part of a half-century.

Hiram—and a majority of the Legislature scrupulously bought and paid for by Southern Pacific—told the railroad they could be fruitful and multiply, although not exactly in those words. Hiram and his legislative buds did what they did because the naked political truth was that if Southern Pacific dictated the outcome, a new game in a new venue with new rules had to be created.

There are 11 propositions on this year’s November ballot. Seems like a bunch, but that’s 12 less than the 23 measures that found their way onto the October 1911 ballot.

In 101 years, 350 initiatives have qualified for the ballot. Through March of this year, Californians have OK’d 116. Pretty close to one out of every three.

Of course, it’s calamity—not quantity—that counts.

Here are just a few of that 33 percent that transmogrified California’s political landscape:

In 1978, Proposition 13 became the darling of California voters who wanted to restrict the annual increase in their property taxes. Even now, after more than three decades, the same voters blithely ignore the ugliness wrought by their cavefish vision, which has shackled local governments to fruitlessly sucking off the ever-drier hind tit of the great ol’ state of California.

How about 1988’s Proposition 98, which says at least 40 cents of very dollar entering state coffers must be sent to public schools?

Rock on, public-school heads. But when the shit rain of budgetary badness descends, that 40 cents becomes a de facto ceiling—and the biggest annual billion-dollar budget whack is the two-by-four walloped upside the temples of numerous gutsy teachers and the hundreds of thousands of kiddos enriched by their perseverance.

Yet even though the initiative process appears all too often to be manipulated by hucksters with the smackeroo-laden pockets essential to gathering the 807,000-plus signatures to place a “much-needed, good-government constitutional reform” on the ballot, there is reason to rejoice.

Ignore the TV and radio ads. Focus on the hundreds of thousands of Californians who signed petitions to allow millions more of their brethren and sisterns to weigh in on some truly weighty issues. Is the death penalty archaic, expensive or appropriate (Proposition 34)? Should consumers be told that some of the contents of the food they’re buying might be genetically modified (Proposition 37)? How about all Californians kicking down a little larger for public schools (Proposition 38)?

This year is the 101st anniversary of California’s initiative process. Love it. Hate it. Feed it Brussels sprouts.

But remember who the real decision-makers are: Act in haste, repent at leisure.