The legislature passes hundreds of laws every year, but only a handful of citizen initiatives ever make it into the law books. So why, the legislature’s critics want to know, do legislators get so upset about direct democracy, those paltry few issues that citizens manage to petition successfully onto the ballot?
Maybe it’s because many of the laws the legislature passes every year deal with a larger law – the law of unintended consequences. And citizen initiatives are loaded with them.
Legislators understand that despite all the institutional checks and balances, the minimum of six votes on every bill, the committee hearings, the partisan posturing, the tinkering and compromising and occasional statesmanship, no law is ever perfect. Problems are always popping up. Adjustments must be made. New bills have to be introduced to fix the old bills.
That doesn’t happen with citizen initiatives, particularly the constitutional amendments that activists favor. Very few would-be reformers ever propose a statutory initiative; they worry the legislature will pass mischievous “fixes.” A constitutional amendment, though, can’t be fixed or otherwise tinkered with unless there’s another vote of the citizenry.
So citizen initiatives are full of unintended consequences, or at least unfulfilled expectations. This newspaper reported last Sunday that, despite passage of Amendment 41 – the initiative intended to curb the influence of lobbyists that was suspended by a judge on Thursday – the amount of money spent on lobbying has increased.
That’s not surprising. It’s the nature of the economy that spending increases from year to year. But spending on lobbying might have been expected to decline this year, since Amendment 41 said lobbyists no longer could take legislators to lunch or dinner or buy them gifts.
Yet despite the constitutional amendment, the amount spent lobbying the Colorado General Assembly actually increased by 14 percent from 2006 to 2007. Voters may have thought they were reducing the influence of big money on the legislative process, but the big money kept rolling in.
And yet, while more money was spent, it wasn’t necessarily more effective. The law of unintended consequences and unrealized expectations affects lobbyists, too.
Most of any lobbyist’s work is not pushing some special-interest legislation that will do a big favor for a client. Lobbying is mostly playing defense, trying to make sure that legislators’ brainstorms won’t do too much damage to the status quo.
And sometimes, no matter how much money is spent, things don’t go the way the big-money clients want them to go. This is particularly true when the Democrats are in charge, as they are now. Democrats are not known to be particularly friendly to special interests with a lot of money to spend. Unions are an exception, but they have comparatively less money than big business.
Ironically, one of the biggest spenders on lobbying at the legislature this year, behind only Xcel Energy, was the Article 29 Coalition, whose mission was to look out for the interests of Amendment 41.
Xcel Energy was No. 1 on the list because of the governor’s and legislature’s shared interest in renewable energy. For Xcel, as it was for the Amendment 41 advocates, the 2007 session was a mixed bag. Xcel didn’t always get its way, and Amendment 41 became the bad example of a poorly drafted ballot issue loaded with unintended consequences. Big money didn’t necessarily get more bang for the buck.
It’s a fact of life: You don’t always get what you want – no matter how much you spend.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
