I don’t want Mississippi to relax its abortion ban. This state can be proud that it brought the test case that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and may save an untold number of innocent lives.
But neither do I want the Legislature to enact a ballot initiative process that takes abortion off the table of issues that citizen-led efforts could address.
That would set a bad precedent in which any subject that is unpopular with the majority of lawmakers or with certain special interest groups could be made off-limits.
This year, the Legislature is taking another stab at restoring the state’s initiative process, which was nullified on a technicality in 2021 by the state Supreme Court after voters had overwhelmingly approved legalizing medical marijuana.
In 2023, the House and Senate bogged down on how many signatures should be required to get a petition on the ballot.
This year, the House has injected a new wrinkle. It says it won’t go for restoring citizens’ right to enact laws directly unless it includes a provision that says the process cannot be used to try to change the state’s highly restrictive abortion laws.
It’s obvious where this is coming from. Since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs decision ending the nationwide right to abortion, seven states, including some controlled by Republicans, have either strengthened the language in their laws guaranteeing abortion rights or relaxed restrictions imposed by lawmakers.
The Republican supermajority in the Mississippi House wants to guarantee that this state doesn’t follow that path.
Such a restriction on the initiative process, though, would be contrary to what the Dobbs case was about. The Supreme Court was not asked to ban abortion nationwide but rather to return to the states the authority to individually decide that question — the same authority they had until Roe v. Wade in 1973 made abortion on demand legal throughout the country.
The understanding coming from Dobbs was that there would be states where abortion clinics remained widely available, and states where they would disappear. Each state would decide where it stood on the essential questions of when human life begins and is deserving of society’s protection, whether an unborn child’s right to life supersedes a woman’s right to dictate what happens in her body, and whether there are circumstances in which the precedence of those rights is reversed.
Mississippi, through its elected representatives, has established in law that abortion is unacceptable in nearly all circumstances, with the lone exceptions being when the mother’s life is in danger or when the pregnancy is the result of a rape that’s been reported to law enforcement.
The Legislature should trust the majority of voters to uphold that policy if the question winds up on the ballot, even if it only gets there because of the influence of outside abortion rights groups that fund a petition drive.
An initiative law that makes abortion a forbidden subject is either saying that the lawmakers don’t trust the voters to make the right choice or that the lawmakers fear they have enacted abortion restrictions that are tougher than the majority of the people want.
I hope neither of those possibilities is correct, but it’s the chance Mississippi needs to take if it is going to have an unencumbered initiative process.
Although most of the attention has been on the abortion provision in the House’s initiative proposal, that’s not the only new restriction that chamber has added. It would also bar the initiative process from being used to enact, modify or repeal local or special laws, or laws that appropriate funds from the state treasury. It also carries over the restrictions from the previous initiative law that shielded the state’s retirement system and the right to work regardless of union membership.
The House also proposes to weaken the initiative process in another significant way. It would retain the option for the Legislature to offer an alternative measure on the same ballot as the citizen-drafted proposal, plus it would give the Legislature two years to amend or repeal an initiative after it is approved by voters.
That’s too much legislative second-guessing. If an initiative is flawed, lawmakers should get one bite at correcting it, either by offering an alternative on the front end or correcting it on the back end. It shouldn’t get two shots at overriding the initiative’s intent.
Mississippi needs a “clean” initiative law. It should have a signature threshold that is reasonably high so that voters aren’t bombarded with referendums, but not so high that nothing ever meets the threshold. The process should be used to change state statutes, not the state constitution as the previous initiative law did. And there should few if any subjects off-limits.
The Legislature trusts the voters when it comes to electing them. They should also trust the voters to discern whether an initiative is good for the state or not.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
