Column by Jack Ryan
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down Mississippi’s citizen initiative process, both Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and House Speaker Philip Gunn have said the Legislature needs to fix the law that governs the procedure.
Hosemann and Gov. Tate Reeves also have said that the state, acknowledging the will of the voters, should set up a new medical marijuana program. Gunn has not addressed that specific issue.
The Supreme Court’s ruling involved a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs successfully argued that the initiative approving medical marijuana was invalid because it followed outdated rules about gathering voter signatures.
Reeves, in addition to noting that voters last November supported medical marijuana by a 3-to-1 margin, said that it’s up to the Legislature to fix the citizen initiative process.
Both the initiative process and medical marijuana likely will be revised. But the thought occurs that many of the Republicans in charge of the Legislature chose not to address medical marijuana in recent years. They probably believed most Mississippians would not support the idea. Given the state’s conservative tilt, that was understandable until last year’s poll results surprisingly proved otherwise.
If enough lawmakers want to stop medical marijuana in its tracks and keep it out of the state Constitution, all they have to do is decline to set up a new initiative process that corrects the flaws noted in the Supreme Court ruling. They also could squash any medical marijuana legislation to prevent it from becoming legal by statute.
This strategy carries the bonus of preventing other issues uncomfortable to the majority from proceeding — in particular two noteworthy proposals that were in their very early stages.
One would require the state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while the other would replace the initiative rejected by the Supreme Court by legalizing marijuana products for any purpose.
The temptation to let these issues wither is obvious. But the flip side of the coin is that the citizen initiative process also has been used in the past to put at least two items into the Constitution that many Republicans supported.
Chief among them is the voter ID requirement for elections — even though, thankfully, there has been no significant controversy about the issue since it became the law in Mississippi. The other restricts the state’s ability to acquire private land through eminent domain.
Though the Supreme Court ruling said nothing about whether voter ID and the eminent domain restrictions are still legal, it would only take one lawsuit, or even the threat of a lawsuit, to answer that question.
If the requirements for the medical marijuana initiative were flawed, and voter ID and eminent domain used the same requirements, it follows that those too are flawed. This ought to give lawmakers enough of an incentive to update the state’s initiative process.
