Coming to grips with the grass roots

THE VICTORY SPEECH Governor-elect Deval Patrick delivered on the night of Nov. 7 was characteristically hopeful and idealistic -- and passionate on the subject of citizen power. "We have a mandate to change the way we do business on Beacon Hill and to keep the grass roots alive and growing," he told his assembled supporters.

A few weeks earlier, at a rally on the Boston Common, he sounded a similar note. "Grass-roots governing, like grass-roots campaigning, is about listening to people -- going to where they are in their lives and workplaces," he told the crowd. "This [campaign] is not just about strengthening partisan politics, it's about reviving citizenship."

Citizen activism was the dominant theme of the Patrick campaign. And last week his key campaign organizer, John Walsh, confirmed that one thing Patrick means by "grass-roots governing" is that he will create a new political organization for his network of volunteers and donors. He has also encouraged his backers to stay involved in community affairs and local Democratic Party politics.

If that's the extent of the new governor's program for transforming politics and civic life, it is neither controversial nor especially ambitious. But suppose Patrick's uplifting rhetoric about the need for more citizen participation is taken seriously -- even by those who have a different vision for state government.

Only days after Patrick's election, a battle erupted on Beacon Hill that featured energized and vocal grass-roots activists -- though not the ones Patrick had in mind. They were pushing for a vote to amend the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage. Legislators met in joint session on Nov. 9 and spent a long afternoon avoiding action. At the end of the day, they voted to recess until Jan. 2, apparently dooming the amendment by parliamentary maneuver. As protesters kept up a drumbeat of "let the people vote" over the next week, it was outgoing governor Mitt Romney who seized the democratic high ground and blasted legislators for ignoring "the voice of the people."

"Certainly what's happened in the last several weeks is not in line with what Governor-elect Patrick is advocating," says Kristin Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which has led the drive for a constitutional amendment. "November 9th was business as usual." Mineau's group joined Governor Romney and others in asking the Supreme Judicial Court to find a remedy for the Legislature's inaction. The court is expected to make a ruling this week or next.

No one really expected Patrick to side with the "let the people vote" crowd. He took a clear stance in his campaign in favor of same-sex marriage, saying the issue is settled and the state needs to "move on." Nor did he attempt to pass himself off as a champion of "direct democracy." He spoke against honoring the 2000 ballot proposition to roll back the state income tax to 5 percent.

And yet efforts by activists --both liberal and conservative -- to use ballot initiatives to overcome legislative inertia have been a defining feature of Massachusetts politics in recent decades. More often than not, the Legislature is coming out on top in those power struggles -- and sometimes by bending the rules.

The battle over same-sex marriage is just the most recent example. In fact, if Jan. 2 comes and goes without a vote on the proposed amendment -- and on another one asserting a right of universal access to healthcare that is also pending -- the Legislature will have disposed of seven of the last eight citizen-proposed amendments, not by up-or-down votes but by motions to adjourn or recess.

This side of Beacon Hill politics puts Patrick in a difficult spot: If the same-sex marriage debate illustrates the dangers, from his perspective, of direct public involvement in lawmaking, the Legislature's machinations also feed the kind of public cynicism about politics that Patrick has so often decried.

Good-government reformers have complained about closed-off legislatures for a long time -- and Massachusetts may not be the worst offender. A couple of years ago, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU produced a study that called New York state government the "most dysfunctional" in the nation. Seymour Lachman, a disenchanted New York state senator, detailed the problems in a book this fall entitled "Three Men in a Room." Lachman argued that all major decisions in Albany are made by the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker.

Massachusetts has seen a similar pattern over recent years. In fact, during some stretches of the 1990s, Beacon Hill operated more on the "two men in a room" model, as when Senate President Tom Birmingham and House Speaker Tom Finneran famously spent six months in 1999 negotiating details of an overdue state budget while the Republican governor, Paul Cellucci, was frozen out.

Now Patrick has a chance to at least move Massachusetts back to triumvirate rule. He begins with the widespread expectation he will have a better working relationship with House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi and Senate President Robert Travaglini than Romney had, if only by virtue of being of the same party. Patrick's plan to keep his political organization active signals he wants to negotiate from a position of strength.

Cynics will call that "machine politics." But Patrick's civic agenda is likely to include other worthy ideas. His working group on civic engagement, one of several transition groups charged with developing an agenda for the Patrick administration, has discussed allowing same-day voter registration, improving public access to government documents through better websites, and redesigning civics education in the schools.

These modest reforms, however, don't get at the thornier questions raised by citizen initiatives, and it remains to be seen whether Patrick intends to make reforming that process part of his agenda.

Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, wonders why a new governor would make wider citizen activism one of his priorities. "Most citizen participation is negative," says Ehrenhalt. "The main reason most citizens participate most of the time is to oppose things." Realistically, Patrick might stand to get more done simply by working well with top legislative leaders. "If it's 'three men in a room' and you see eye-to-eye with the other two, it's hard to imagine why you'd want to change that," Ehrenhalt says.

Certainly, the Progressive-era reforms that gave citizens the power to propose laws and constitutional amendments are not in favor with today's lawmakers. The powers derive from Article 48 in the state constitution, which was drafted by the Legislature in 1917 and approved by the voters the following year. The thinking at the time was that voters needed a way to overrule legislatures when they were too much in the control of powerful business interests.

But it turns out that powerful economic interests can use the process, too -- sending out paid signature-gatherers to put questions on the ballot that do not really spring from "the grass roots." And the question raised by the same-sex marriage amendment is a vexing one for those who idealize populist democracy: Is it acceptable to submit a question of minority rights to majority rule?

Of course, few legislators will speak out publicly against the citizen rights created in Article 48. But their actions tell the story. The Legislature came near to a constitutional crisis in 1999, as it steadfastly refused to fund a law approved by voters creating public financing of elections -- a clear violation of its constitutional duty, according to a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court.

Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, a nonpartisan government reform group, says that due to legislative intransigence, "the ballot process for a constitutional amendment is essentially dead." David Donnelly, the lead activist in the "clean elections" battle of the 1990s, says the ability of voters to create laws (which is meant to be easier than amending the constitution) is in doubt, as well.

Donnelly, an organizer for Washington D.C.-based Public Campaign, says the health of the initiative process ought to be of concern to the new governor. "That's absolutely part of civic engagement," he says.

And if the Legislature -- and perhaps the governor -- have no confidence in Article 48's rules, wouldn't it at least make sense to try to change them?

But what would changing them mean? The problem, of course, is that it would take a new constitutional amendment to rewrite Article 48 -- and it would have to be approved by the voters. And as many activists would point out, Massachusetts already has high hurdles in place for the citizen initiative. Of the 18 states that allow citizens to propose constitutional amendments, Massachusetts is the only one that requires legislative approval before the amendment can go to the ballot.

Still, there may be a good-government argument to be made that majority support in the Legislature should be required for constitutional amendments (as it stands, amendment proponents need support from only a quarter of the Legislature in two consecutive sessions). And yet, realistically, there is almost no chance voters would decide to weaken their initiative powers. Does that mean the Commonwealth faces a problem without a solution?

Benjamin Barber, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and author of "Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age" (1984), admits that empowering citizens is a tough sell to those in power. "There's no question that involving and engaging citizens in a serious way in self-government is much more complicated and difficult for politicians," Barber says. It risks "that a certain amount of their power is actually returned to the people."

Nevertheless, Barber, who directs CivWorld, a New York-based organization that promotes democratic innovation, contends that a governor must take a bold approach if he wants to expand citizen democracy. The answer, Barber says, is in moving beyond "let the people vote."

"Part of the point of direct democracy and strong democracy is not just to get citizens to vote on things but to get individuals to turn into citizens," Barber says. "And that's a process that is more than just about voting."

If initiative and referenda powers are to be meaningful they need to become "more deliberative" Barber says, which means requiring more work on the part of the voters. Coming to "a wise judgment" requires more than a modern-style political battle waged with manipulative television spots. Barber envisions new uses of Internet networks, distribution of high-quality educational materials provided by all sides, frequent televised debates, and even a series of straw votes before the final binding one.

Updating our Progressive-era reforms for the modern world may sound utopian, but going in the other direction -- asking voters to beef up the powers of the Legislature -- is no more realistic.

Dave Denison is a former editor of CommonWealth magazine.