Speaking last week at a gathering of business leaders in Jackson, Gov. Phil Bryant said he hopes the Legislature will put to a popular referendum next year whether to change Mississippi’s state flag and whether to raise taxes and fees to pay for road and bridge repairs.
“I’ve always liked direct democracy,” the Republican governor said.
Really? Since when? The governor has made a lot of decisions — some of them unilateral — over his two terms in office for which he hasn’t asked the public to vote.
He didn’t ask the people whether they were for expanding Medicaid to cover the working poor in this state and keep rural hospitals solvent. He didn’t ask the people whether they wanted the opportunity to buy health insurance on a state-operated marketplace when he undermined Republican Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney’s hard work to set one up. He didn’t ask the people whether they favored giving away hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare to foreign companies to bribe them to put factories here.
What Bryant really means when he says he likes “direct democracy” is that he likes to pawn off the decisions when it would otherwise take political courage to act.
It’s easy in this heavily conservative and Republican-dominated state to pander against anything associated with Democratic former President Barack Obama, including Obamacare. It’s easy to give away the taxpayers’ money so you can pat yourself on the back as a job creator, and not do a critical financial analysis of whether that investment will ever pay for itself, knowing that you’ll be out of office before the full impact of the giveaways is felt.
What’s hard is to make choices that your base of support might initially not like but which you know — or should know — serve the long-term interests of Mississippi, such as shedding a national image as racially recalcitrant or fixing a crumbling transportation infrastructure.
If these tough decisions are just going to be punted to the people, why do we need legislators or a governor at all? Why not just let all laws and policy decisions be settled by referendum?
The reason we don’t, besides the impracticality of trying to deal with the number and complexity of laws that government bodies are expected to enact, is that those who founded this country understood that there were times when the voters’ elected representatives must lead popular opinion, not just follow it. It is why we operate largely as a “representative” democracy, not a “direct” one.
We elect people to office in the hope that they will see the bigger picture. Ultimately, we hope that they will have the courage to do the right thing even when a significant share of those who voted for them don’t immediately see it.
When elected officials from a majority party tout “direct democracy,” they have neither that courage nor that vision. They are just looking for an easy way out.
