So last year, Oklahoma voters affirmed two questions last November. SQ 780 made drug offenses (and certain other property crimes) with a valuation of under $1000 a misdemeanor, punishable by a $1000 fine and/or no more than 1 year in jail. SQ 781 took any savings from that reform and allocated it for drug treatment.
It seems that those charged with administering the laws don’t care for the voters’ wishes and have introduced legislation that would negate the will of the voters in the form of House Bill 1482 and Senate Bill 512.
So the author of that Fault Lines article ends with this:
Is this scary? Is it okay?
Is this the way that our society should work?
Why would legislators do this? Are they gambling that they can please the monied interests that build, maintain and stock prisons and related trades but not piss their constituents off enough to get voted out? Do they just think that they know better than the public what needs to be done? Something else? Robots with 1920s style death rays, maybe?
I’m particularly interested in what people from Oklahoma have to say about all this, of course.
Because governments, local, state and federal, all make money off of the War on (Some) Drugs. Police departments get better equipment to fight TWOSD. Civil forfeiture rakes in the dough. Private prisons stay full (and profitable) because of petty marijuana and minor cocaine/crack convictions.
The halls of government reap an awful lot of money off of TWOSD. They can’t just give it up because the PEOPLE, of all things, don’t like it.
And also: talk about it. Talk about the way the money grab defies the clearly-stated will of the people of Oklahoma. Laugh to scorn any Oklahoma legislator who piously claims “morality” as the reason for his (or her) vote.
As long as the shreds of democracy haven’t yet been completely eradicated, there’s hope that the legislators who make it clear that they are for sale to the highest bidder, like these Oklahoma sellouts, might get the boot. And during the campaign, everyone should talk, talk, talk about the massive profits being made.
My speculation (PNOOMA*), would be that the 58% may break down into 85% support among the 40% of the voters who are Democrats, versus 40% support among the 60% who are Republican. So for those Republicans who don’t want to get primaried but can coast in the general election, its a no brainier.
*Pulling numbers out of my Ass
This is complicated for me because in general I favor representative democracy over direct democracy, meaning I’m not in favor of these sorts of things being ballot initiatives in the first place. In my perfect world our elective representatives would know better than the public about what needs to be done because it would be their job to do so. In this perfect world voters would be looking at issues of competency and broad philosophical directions that they’d like to go in.
So in the general sense I’m okay with legislators going against voters wishes on specific issues. We’re supposedly electing leaders, after all, not yes-men.
Obviously we don’t live in that world, and this may be a case where they’re deliberately putting their constituents in harms way by picking suboptimal policy for the purposes of maximizing profits for a small subset of donors. It does strike me that draconian punishment and stringent minimum sentencing rules for low level drug offenses has not been effective.
So I’m not against the process that allows for differences between legislatures and voters. Just the specific outcome in this case.
Legislators all over the US represent their true constituents: the money men (and a few women) who fund their election campaigns. What, you expected otherwise?
I touched on this briefly in my first comment, but want to expand. The whole purpose behind the militarization of local police departments (the siege vehicles, the armored gear, the automatic weapons, etc) is the War on Some Drugs. That those implements have come into use for crowd control of peaceful protests (as with Black Lives Matter, or Ferguson, or Baltimore) is gravy.
This is what matters. If voters want to correct the problem, they can change their representatives. I agree that it’s an outrage, but it’s one that has a simple fix. They should assume that any legislator that would vote for this sort of nonsense doesn’t really hold principles like civil liberties, people power, and a fair and equitable society in high regard.
That depends on an educated populace, journalism that covers reality rather than paranoid fantasy, and people who believe those journalists even when they’re telling them things that disagree with their preexisting political and social opinions.
Currently, a large percentage of the population gets their information from, and trusts with a near fanatical absolutism, sources of news that are best described as “entirely fictional.”
Until we can find a way to bring real information back to voters, and those same voters start acting on it in a rational way, the “wait for the voters to fix it” solution isn’t going to work.
The thing is, TimeWinder, that in this instance, the voters did fix it and now their representatives are trying to undo those fixes.
I mean, you and asahi are talking about the broader policy implications and such, but what about what is happening right now?
What is driving it? Where is the money coming from? Who is making the phone calls? What does the Oklahoma public know and what do they think about it, or are they focused on the current football season(s) taking place? Is the media in Oklahoma talking about this?
I don’t know how Oklahoma’s referendum system works, but it seems to me that if you have two different methods for creating law, then you need some sort of ground rules for which one takes precedence. And it seems to me like that ought to be the referendum. If the legislature and the people as a whole agreed, then you wouldn’t need both, so referenda would only be relevant when the legislature didn’t agree. And if the legislature can just reverse a referendum they disagree with, then why have the referendum at all?
This is almost as embarrassing as that Pruitt guy being appointed the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency…
Ignoring our vote is a direct assault on the will of the people. The police in Oklahomastan, will be like landed aristocracy, collecting rents from the incarceration state/prison system. Crooked politicians and prison lobbyists will get fat and sassy from more minor drug arrests.
It ain’t easy being Blue in a Red State. All we can do is TRY to elect decent legislators …
BTW - Not everybody is football nutz … OSU Rickie Fowler fan here.
I, Okie born and bred, once became a turd in the punch bowl when I asked about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) at a local BBQ, if the parents of high school football players worried about it. Oh no they said, the new helmets are stronger and give more protection, etc. I said the way I understand it, no matter how thick the helmet, the brain still bounces around inside the skull like a sponge and gets bruised.
They changed the subject, and I have not been invited back. I especially miss the brisket and the beer can chicken.
I resemble that remark. Look, all I can do is vote, then when they try to reverse my vote, I holler, and phone, and email and snail mail my objections. When I try to organize a protest at the State Capitol my neighbors say, ‘well, come to think of it, drug crime does lead to violent crime.’ Then I say, ‘but violent crime has been in decline for decades while drug use has risen,’ they say, ‘that’s not what I read.’
Typical of those on the right, facts don’t matter. Gut instinct does. And they are louder than I am.
I think others have already commented on the true intentions of the war on drugs. I’m fine with putting drug traffickers into the clink for an extended period of time like most countries do, but when we’re obsessed with jailing people merely for possessing street narcotics at a time when most of these elected bozos take money from the ultimate drug trafficker, big pharma, then there’s something else behind a desire to have a drug-free society. It’s a desire to have a minority-free society, or an under class-free society. Anything they can do to take more people off the list of eligible voters, I suppose. Beyond that, it’s a tool for intimidation.
Close. IMO, it has more to do with maintaining a populace that “knows” it is indebted to and restrained by the system. Keeping people under the thumb of society, so to speak.