SQ 779 and the limits of direct democracy (Capitol Updates)

Steve Lewis served as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1989-1991. He currently practices law in Tulsa and represents clients at the Capitol. You can find past Capitol Updates archived  on his website.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court this past week ruled against OCPA Impact, the group that had challenged State Question 779, the penny sales tax for education, in an attempt to keep it off the general election ballot in November. The court ruled that the challenge was untimely because it challenged the “gist” of the question—the language that appears on the ballot—and the challenge should have been made before the initiative petition was circulated.

The court did, however, change the language of the “gist” to make it more clear where the money is actually going. The one-cent increase in the sales tax will generate $615 million per year in state revenue beginning July 1, 2017 and guarantee public school teachers a $5,000 per year raise. Of the new revenue, 69.5 percent will be allocated to public schools, 19.25 percent to public higher education and 3.25 percent to career tech education. There’s also language in the measure to prevent the legislature from “supplanting” education dollars, which means allocating the new revenue as directed but removing funding from past revenue sources that would otherwise have gone to education.

The need for having to circulate an initiative petition to get teachers a pay raise, a goal an overwhelming majority of people seem to agree with, lays bare the situation we have allowed to develop in Oklahoma. Essentially we’re having to resort to direct democracy to make decisions about core government issues, which is not the form of government anticipated by the founders. In a representative democracy, which was intended, there is the give and take of the legislative process where all points of view have input and finally a compromise is reached that is usually not what any particular group wanted but which moves the state in the direction the majority would like to see.

In a direct democracy you have one group, the group that wrote the initiative petition, who gets to decide not only that the new revenue is needed, but how it will be raised and how it will be spent. Then you have everyone else whose only input is to vote “yes” or “no.” This is not the best way to make public policy. I’ll be voting “yes” because my concern for the needs of our students and teachers outweighs my apprehension about the way the money is being raised. I have no idea how this will turn out, nor the consequences of a “yes” win or a “no” win, but I think people who are in the arena should be giving a lot of thought to how we got here and how we can find a better way forward for our state.