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Were not big fans of citizen initiatives. They are end runs around what, in a perfect world, should be a legislative process carried out byelected representatives in a deliberative and bipartisan fashion.

But its not a perfect world far from it, as John McCain so eloquently pointed out Thursday on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He then put his money where his mouth was by casting the deciding Republican vote against yet another repeal/replace bill on Obamacare.

McCain and the Senate dont have to worry about citizen initiatives unless enough states agree to call a Constitutional Convention. Faced with gridlock within their own party, Republicans inside the Beltway will now have to sit down with Democrats, craft bipartisan health reform, then hold hearings and floor debates. It might be messier than Mitch McConnells My way or the highway dictum, but were pretty certain its what most voters expect of Congress even if they dont agree with the ultimate results.

In Arizona, where the citizen initiative is baked into the state constitution, the entrenched interests have not been able to fend off grassroots reform of what had become a closed, self-perpetuating system. Citizens have endorsed public financing for statewide and legislative candidates, an independent commission to redraw legislative and congressional districts rather than politicians, and a statewide minimum wage. They even passed a law prohibiting lawmakers from undoing citizen initiatives by legislative fiat.

Its this last initiative that has given legislative leaders fits, even though the courts have said any initiative must come with its own funding source. Voters,the leaderssay, are too easily swayed by special interests mounting self-serving campaigns for things like medical marijuana and casino gaming. If you want mob rule, why not do away with the Legislature altogether, they ask?

We might have been more sympathetic to this argument before Citizens United unleashed a torrent of campaign cash on behalf of hardline primary candidates who adopt the same tunnel vision as their funders. In Arizona,the mantrais no new taxes even if it starves the schools, as little regulation of the free market as possible and tighter voting rules that fall hardest on minorities and the poor the very groups least likely to vote for entrenched interests. Redistricting even by a citizen commission ran afoul of federal civil rights protections for minorities that concentrated Democrats in too few competitive districts, and public campaign financing has been overwhelmed by independent spending committees that use wedge issues to drive out substance. Even in the U.S. Senate, the filibuster is the tactic not of last resort but everyday strategy, so polarized have the sides become.

And now, the Republicans have decided that if they cant undo citizen initiatives in the Legislature, they will just deny petitioners access to the ballot altogether. The majority passed and the governor signed bills outlawing paying initiative and referendum petition circulators by the signature (too much temptation to forge signatures, they said) and holding petitions to a strict compliance standard every name and address must match the voter rolls exactly and conform precisely to the petition form.

As we noted above, were not enamored of citizen petitions. But when political inequality on the campaign trail, at the polling place and in the Legislature has become so tilted, we can see why an end run around representative democracy and an appeal to the grassroots seems like the only course left. The alternative, as several commentators have noted, is a vote for someone like Trump, who plays upon the unfairness of the new economy and its job insecurity, wage stagnation and wealth gap to appeal not to more open voting and representation but closed borders, withdrawing from trade agreements and restricting security alliances. The bad guys are not the captains of industry and finance seeking economic advantage through self-serving donations but the little guys immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and journalists who historically are easy prey for demagogues.

We dont know what the cure is nationally for the growing closed system as long as Citizens United stands. But in Arizona, we already have term limits and public funding of campaigns the latter, however, needs more money, not less. And why not try open primaries, as have the states of Washington and California, in the interest of more middle-ground candidates? Lawmakers who devalue the constitutional right to the initiative arent likely to be convinced to change their minds at a legislative or court hearing. They need to be replaced and the initiative protections restored.

Ideally, those rights would need to be used only sparingly. But knowing theyhave been restored wouldmean that we are back on the road to a political equality that is the only way to begin to address widening economic inequality. Given how wide that gap has already become, its a process that cant start too soon.

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Our View: Protect direct democracy amid closed politics - Arizona Daily Sun

Whether Netanyahu intends to instate the death sentence for terrorists, or whether he's lying to placate his constituency, he's unworthy of leading a democracy

Its obvious to any sensible person what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up to these days. To blur what is perceived by many of his supporters as a national humiliation at the Temple Mount, hes trumpeting right-wing and patriotic expressions: a heros reception for the security officer at the Israeli Embassy in Amman, support for the Jerusalem and nation-state bills, a suggestion to transfer the Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm to the Palestinians, calls for the death penalty on the murderer at the settlement of Halamish.

The death sentence is cold-blooded murder perpetrated by civil society; the hangmans hood is the mask behind which both the people and cowardly politicians hide. But Netanyahu who assumes his electoral base is an aggressive guard dog to be tempted by racist and violent statements bombards the public with ultra-nationalist declarations every time he advances a policy thats somewhat moderate.

He thereby puts opponents of his policies in a bind. Should they play the part of the scapegoat he gives them in the show he stages for his voters, decrying the undoing of Israeli democracy as required of them in this play? Or should they ignore his declarations as long as these statements arent backed by actions?

Should we be dragged yet again into debates over the nation-state bill and ignore his wink and nod over his voters' heads, while he drags out the vote on this bill from one Knesset session to the next? Its already established that he votes for bills he objects to in the knowledge that the High Court of Justice will strike them down, as he did with the bill that permits the expropriation of private Palestinian land.

Netanyahu hurls his poisoned darts at the heart of Israeli democracy along with instructions to neutralize their effects. The death sentence for terrorists is something that should be implemented in heinous cases. Its enshrined in the law. You need to have the judges reach unanimity, but they also want to know the governments position. My position as prime minister, in such a case of a murderer as lowly as this, is that he must be put to death, he consoled the Salomon family in their grief.

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This is a classic Netanyahu move. The public, hurting and clamoring for revenge, gets its pound of flesh. Sane people get the antidote thats embedded in the statement: the need for the judges unanimity.

Netanyahus opponents can take comfort in the fact that compared to some of his wildest statements, even his harsh policies sometime seem moderate. This is, however, small comfort, and in the long run it doesnt matter. Residue from the poison lingers, and the body of democracy continues to weaken. Whether Netanyahu intends to instate the death sentence for terrorists, or whether hes lying as a way to placate his constituency, hes unworthy of standing at the head of a democracy.

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Excerpt from:
A death sentence for democracy - Haaretz Editorial - Israel News ... - Haaretz

Tracey Tapp | special to the Daily News

While being interviewed by the Daily News for the article "Taking it to the Streets" (July 20 edition), I was asked if we were afraid to protest. I was taken aback by the question. Why should we be afraid to carry out our responsibility to participate in our democracy?

Ive reflected a lot on that question since the interview. The fact is, some Progressives Northwest Florida members are afraid to be vocal about their views because it could hurt their business or negatively impact their children in school. And to be honest, we do think about our physical safety. Let that sink in. What has our country come to when you cant express political views without fear for your physical safety?

This fear is not unfounded. Bikers for Trump provide security for Congressman Matt Gaetz. And there is evidence they roughed up an attendee at one of his town halls. He also invited a local militia to protect him. Let that sink in. Do you want to live in a country where elected officials use non-government, para-military forces to rough up constituents that dont agree with their positions?

We are mostly women. Ask any staffer at the Pensacola office of Senator Rubio or Congressman Gaetz. Weve met with them every Tuesday for the last six months to participate in our democracy. We are unarmed. We adhere to the principles of non-violent resistance. We are not dangerous. This is true across the country. Let this sink in. Non-violent women are leading the resistance.

Despite this, the National Rifle Association recently released a video depicting us as violent and essentially inviting people to take matters into their own hands. So yes, in this 2nd Amendment loving area, we think about our safety. Let that sink in. You are being told lies about who we are and what our aims are. You are being asked to incite violence against women exercising their civil liberties.

Add to this the fact that state legislatures across the country are advancing bills to criminalize public protests. The basic tenants of our democracy free speech and the right to assembly are under attack. Let that sink in. Do you want to live in a country where criticizing the government is a crime?

Progressives Northwest Florida appreciates it when city governments help us secure permits for our marches and vigils. We appreciate it when the police help us understand and abide by the laws that govern civil discourse and disobedience in our country. And we especially appreciate it when they keep us safe while exercising these rights.

We want you to know we are here. And even if we are sometimes afraid, we are not going away. Let that sink in.

This guest column was written by Tracey Tapp, who lives in Fort Walton Beach.

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GUEST COLUMN: Is it dangerous to participate in democracy? - The Northwest Florida Daily News

The list of delegates includes powerful members of the presidents political movement, including Diosdado Cabello, a top lawmaker in the ruling Socialist Party who was involved in a failed coup attempt in the 1990s, and Cilia Flores, the presidents wife.

But the push to consolidate power also puts the country at a crossroads, one laden with risk.

As Mr. Maduro effectively steers his country toward one-party rule, he sets it on a collision course with the United States, which buys nearly half of Venezuelas oil. On Wednesday, the Trump administration froze the assets of, and forbade Americans to do business with, 13 Venezuelans close to Mr. Maduro, including his interior minister and heads of the army, police and national guard.

The administration is warning that harsher measures could follow, with strong and swift economic actions if the vote happens on Sunday, according to Mr. Trump. In a statement, he called Mr. Maduro a bad leader who dreams of becoming a dictator.

There is also the potential powder keg on Venezuelas streets. Infuriated by Mr. Maduros government, the opposition has mobilized more than three months of street protests that have crippled cities with general strikes, rallies and looting. More than 110 people have been killed, many in clashes between the state and armed protesters. Few know how protesters will react to newly imposed rulers.

Even the members of the new assembly themselves are a wild card. Their power will be so vast that they could possibly remove Mr. Maduro from office, some analysts note, ending a presidency that has been deeply unpopular, even among many leftists.

Its a crapshoot, a Pandoras box, said Alejandro Velasco, a Venezuelan historian at New York University who studies the countrys leftist movements. You do this and you have so little control over how it plays out.

Mr. Maduro contends that the government restructuring is necessary to prevent more bloodshed on the streets and save Venezuelas failing economy, which is dogged by shortages of food and medicine.

The president has refused to negotiate with street protesters, calling some of them terrorists and asserting that they are financed by outside governments trying to overthrow him. A new governing charter would give him wide-ranging tools to construct peace, he and leftists have said.

We need order, justice, Mr. Maduro said during an interview with state television this month. We have only one option, a national constituent assembly.

The turmoil gripping Venezuela illustrates the sweeping declines in popularity for the Venezuelan left since the death of its standard-bearer, President Hugo Chvez, in 2013.

It was Mr. Chvez who oversaw the last rewrite of the Constitution, in 1999, which was widely backed by the voters who had propelled him to office in the belief that the countrys rule book favored the rich.

That new Constitution and rising oil prices fueled a Socialist-inspired transformation in Venezuela. It helped enable Mr. Chvez to redistribute state wealth to the poor, nationalize foreign assets and make him popular with his supporters. The Constitution also left open the possibility of another constituent assembly in the future.

Now Mr. Maduro has taken that option at a time when the leftists are dogged by their deepest crisis in decades. This time, Venezuelans are seeing it less as a stab at reform than as an attempt by a struggling ruling class to maintain power.

Its a last-ditch effort to secure his base, Mr. Velasco said. Hes doing it at a moment of weakness.

Under the rules of the vote, the constituent assembly would take the reins of the country within 72 hours of being officially certified, though it is unclear to most people what would happen after that.

Some politicians have already suggested that governorships and mayors be replaced with communal councils. Top members of Mr. Maduros party have identified Luisa Ortega, the attorney general, who has criticized Mr. Maduros crackdown on protesters, as someone to be immediately dismissed.

Continued here:
As Venezuela Prepares to Vote, Some Fear an End to Democracy - New York Times

In such a system, even steps like Mr. Sharifs removal, which nominally reinforce accountability and the rule of law, can deepen decidedly undemocratic norms.

Though justice prevailed, so did perceptions that it is applied selectively. Though corruption was punished, so was, in the eyes of many of Mr. Sharifs supporters, defiance of the military.

The country has shown it can lawfully remove a prime minister, but it has also shown that voters, who have been allowed to decide only one peaceful transfer of power, still have their leaders selected for them. They are spectators foremost, and participants only occasionally, in their countrys democracy.

Many Pakistanis quickly noticed something that suggested Mr. Sharifs removal might perpetuate, rather than end, the undemocratic norms that have plagued Pakistan for decades.

The Supreme Court has pursued Mr. Sharif but sidestepped many of the other politicians and officials implicated in the Panama Papers leak that set off the investigation, leading to accusations that it was pursuing selective justice.

Moral of the story: when with the establishment, you will not be touched, Asma Jahangir, a prominent human rights lawyer, wrote on Twitter, adding, but if you disagree your grand mom will also be investigated.

This common perception that politicians serve their own interests and that accountability is deployed according to the whims of the elite matters. Those expectations help entrench such behavior as a norm, making it more likely to recur.

This problem extends beyond Mr. Sharif. Tax evasion rates in Pakistan are notoriously high, particularly among the wealthy. Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, ranked the country 113 out of 176 countries in its corruption perceptions index.

Though laws against corruption are strongly written, they are underenforced. And weak elected institutions are easily corrupted. Together, that means that nearly any leader is vulnerable to prosecution and removal if other institutions choose to single him or her out.

But each time they do so, they reinforce the belief impression that true power lies with the so-called hidden hands, powerful military and other elites who manipulate the system according to their own wishes, not with voters.

The decision in Mr. Sharifs case, which took a very broad view of the constitutional clauses requiring politicians to be honest and reliable, risks exacerbating perceptions that justice is often a means to a political end.

The clause under which he was removed essentially means all of Pakistan is ineligible, said Adil Najam, the dean of Boston Universitys School of Global Studies and an expert on Pakistans politics.

Accountability, in such a system, can also be a tool for targeting rivals. This weakens the expectation of punishment, which is supposed to deter future corruption, as well as the ability of healthy institutions to self-regulate.

Mr. Sharifs removal, even if it does discourage corruption, repeats a pattern that has recurred throughout Pakistans history and has been at the core of many of its worst problems. Unelected power centers, not voters, decide who rules.

Only one prime minister has left office in a democratic transition, in 2013. The rest have been removed by judges, generals, bureaucrats or assassins, Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, wrote on Twitter, calling it Pakistans 70-year tradition.

If Mr. Sharif had finished his term and faced elections again, that would have been a second peaceful transition, a milestone many political scientists see as a vital step in consolidating democracy.

You want elected officials to be judged by the population on the basis of their record, said Paul Staniland, a University of Chicago political scientist who studies Pakistan.

Ideally, Mr. Staniland said, successive elections would establish voters, not unelected bodies, as the final arbiters. Beyond being the point of democracy, this makes leaders accountable to the interests of their nation as a whole, rather than those of a few powerful elites.

Democracy fully takes root only when all aspects of the political system assume that final authority rests with voters and elections. For Pakistan, after so many coups and assassinations, persuading everyone of this would take time.

These interventions disrupt that, Mr. Staniland said, by sending the message that elites can continue assuming that they, not voters, still decide who rules.

Those interventions are possible because of an imbalance in the strength of Pakistans institutions. The military and courts are powerful and highly trusted by the public. By contrast, elected institutions, especially political parties, are weak.

The result is that instead of one institution checking another in ways that strengthen the democratic system, those institutions undermine one anothers already scant legitimacy, leaving the stronger unelected bodies to intervene again and again.

Individual checks like the removal of Mr. Sharif, however justified, chip away further at the legitimacy of those institutions. They remain just relevant enough to jostle for power, ensuring more such cycles, but too weak to actually clean out the system a recipe for instability.

With each such case, those institutions are also on trial. In a healthier democracy, finding a politician guilty proves the system works. In Pakistan, where elected institutions are often assumed to be corrupt, it can mean, in the eyes of voters, indicting the system as just as guilty.

Imran Khan, an opposition leader, has pursued Mr. Sharifs ouster for years, filing court petitions and leading public protests to press watchdog groups and now the Supreme Court.

The military also opposed Mr. Sharif, in part because he sought reconciliation with India, Pakistans rival. That does not mean the military played any role in Mr. Sharifs ouster. But it fed into perceptions that he was outside the good graces of Pakistans power brokers, leaving him vulnerable.

I could tell myself a happy story in which this marks the judiciary asserting the rule of law and getting everything on the right course, Mr. Staniland said. But I think thats pretty unlikely.

A more plausible reading, he added, is that justice is applied inconsistently and will be used to target parties and institutions that will then be unable to recover.

This has led to a norm, Mr. Najam said, of parties seeking to defeat one another not in elections but by creating the conditions for a military or judicial coup against them.

Without a break from Pakistans regular cycles of collapse, political institutions cannot grow stronger, and so cannot provide the real accountability and democracy that voters demand.

Pakistan has always been in this place, Mr. Najam said. Every democratic government in Pakistan that has fallen, and all of them has fallen, has fallen on the sword of supposed accountability.

The Interpreter is a column by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. Follow them on Twitter @Max_Fisher and @amandataub.

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2017, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Pakistan, Ousting Leader, Dashes Fair Democracy Hopes.

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Pakistan, Ousting Leader, Dashes Hopes for Fuller Democracy - New York Times