The Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision last week to throw out on a technicality the voters’ overwhelming approval of medical marijuana was a stunner.
Not only did the court’s 6-3 vote kill medical marijuana, but it nullified any future initiatives — including two recently launched petition drives to expand Medicaid and authorize widespread early voting — until the Legislature updates the state’s initiative process.
Lawmakers, who resent the initiative process because it allows voters to bypass them, may be disinclined to do that.
The court found, in essence, that when Mississippi lost one of its congressional seats following the 2000 census, that should have stopped the initiative process because of the way its signature-gathering guidelines were spelled out when “people power” was added to the constitution in the 1990s.
The court’s majority said that the accommodation used for the past 20 years without objection until now was an overreach by a succession of secretaries of state, both Democratic and Republican.
That accommodation — allowing signatures to be gathered evenly within the boundaries of the five former congressional districts — was used on two earlier and successful initiatives: one that implemented voter ID and another that put limits on eminent domain.
Both of these changes to the constitution, unlike medical marijuana, were highly popular with conservatives. Are they now invalid, too? The court did not mention a word about them.
That seems like a curious omission.
