MUTH’S TRUTHS

Fans of the late, great Chinese General Sun Tzu will recall this lesson from “The Art of War”…

The king asked the general to demonstrate his military training prowess by drilling 180 of the king’s concubines. Sun Tzu agreed, divided that girls into two companies, placed one of them in charge of each company, and then proceeded to tell the girls what to do.

“When I say ‘eyes front,’ you must look straight ahead,” the general instructed. “When I say ‘left turn,’ you must face toward your left hand. When I say ‘right turn,’ you must face toward your right hand. When I say ‘about turn,’ you must face right around toward the back.” He asked if they all understood and the girls said yes.

Sun Tzu then proceeded to issue commands and drill them, at which point the girls broke out in laughter - resulting in the general ordering the pair who had been placed in charge of the two groups to be beheaded.

“If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame,” said Sun Tzu. “But if his orders are CLEAR and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.” And with that, off went their heads.

Not surprisingly, when the general attempted to once again drill the girls after the beheadings, the young ladies “went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling about, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound.”

Go figure.

So what’s all this have to do with anything here today? Glad you asked.

I bring this up because of the Nevada Secretary of State’s decision on Friday to disqualify a petition to amend the Nevada Constitution to require a 2/3 vote of the people in order to approve any tax hikes which might appear on a ballot in the future - the same super-majority requirement currently in place for tax hikes approved by the Nevada Legislature.

The rule is - and the rule is CLEAR - that proponents of the initiative needed to turn in about 60,000 valid signatures from bona fide Nevada voters by May 20, 2008, to qualify the initiative for this November’s ballot. Advocates submitted more than TWICE that number of signatures which was required by the well-established and well-understood rules.

However, during the 2007 session of the Legislature, lawmakers changed the rules for ballot initiatives. In an effort to make it even harder for citizens to participate in their own government, legislators passed two new bureaucratic requirements which apparently weren’t fulfilled by proponents of the tax restraint measure.

One requires that each submitted petition include a statement specifying the number of signatures attached. Apparently the bureaucrats can’t count that high for themselves. Whether or not the proper number of required signatures was collected isn’t important to the paper-pushers or Secretary of State. Only that the new paperwork be filled out in triplicate with every “i” dotted and “t” crossed.

Secondly, the Legislature said that folks circulating petitions for signatures now have to complete and submit an “affidavit” attesting that each person signing the petition had the opportunity to read the proposed initiative in its entirety.

Which is pure BS. We’re talking about grown adults here, folks. People who are trusted to VOTE. If someone signs a petition without reading the full text before signing, who’s fault is that? The signature-gatherer?

I’m not talking about the signature gatherer intentionally misrepresenting what the petition is about. That would be fraud - and there are already existing laws against that. This is nothing more than another new onerous bureaucratic requirement designed to thwart the ability of the people to participate in the initiative process which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not proponents obtained sufficient numbers of qualified signatures to place the measure on the ballot.

The fact is the rules which had been changed were neither clear, nor distinct, nor thoroughly understood. Therefore the fault doesn’t lie with the folks in charge of circulating the petition; the fault lies with the Secretary of State and the Legislature which passed these stupid, senseless, anti-democratic rules in the first place.

Off with their heads!

Posted on June 1st, 2008 by chuckmuth
Filed under: Nevada