A previous post, Turning Tea Party Patriots into Political Petitioners, examined opportunities for new activists to affect change in their home states.  A natural next step is to discuss other options for getting involved.

It remains to be seen if the political activity that this summer generated hundreds of Tea Party protests and capacity crowd town hall meetings turns into a lasting political force.  Many will participate in one event and go back to the daily grind.  A few will remain active, and some may even use their outrage to invest their time and treasure into political campaigns.

For those who seek to become active, there are plenty of resources.  Citizens In Charge and Ballotpedia.org are both aimed at informing citizens of ballot initiatives and expanding the rights of citizens to petition government directly.

There are also organizations that will train candidates and campaign staff.  Since 1979, Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute has worked to train candidates and activists to run effective campaigns for office, mostly on the statewide and federal level.   But traveling across a state or a large congressional district for weeks and months at a time can be too great a sacrifice for most.

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As Americans rise up all across the country to challenge a political elite that many believe does not listen to them, it is important to consider the tools that people in many states have employed to directly affect change: the petition.

In Missouri, our Constitution includes the following passage:

The people reserve power to propose and enact or reject laws and amendments to the constitution by the initiative, independent of the general assembly, and also reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.  (Article 3, Section 49)

The document  clearly states that the people possess the right to initiate laws and constitutional amendments, even though they grant those same powers to their representatives in the legislature.  This is an important since it permits the people to enact laws directly and without going through the standard legislative process.

Unfortunately, in Missouri and other states where the people enjoy this right, the initiative process is continually under assault from state legislatures—Republican and Democrat alike—even to the point of adopting unconstitutional limitations to them.  Such efforts have included the following:

• A 1969 law in Oklahoma required that petition circulators be state residents.  In December 2008, the Tenth Circuit Court unanimously struck down that law as unconstitutional.  The Court did the same to a similar law in Colorado in 2002.

• A 2005 law in Ohio that restricted petition gatherers from being paid per signature was struck down by the Sixth Circuit Court struck in March 2008.  Ohio appealed the decision but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it.  Similar pay-per-signature regulations have been overruled by federal district courts in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Washington.

• A Colorado law that required petitioners to wear badges with their name and whether they were a volunteer or paid circulator was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999.

A common argument for limiting the petition process is that it puts too much money into politics or that it invites fraud.  Yet courts have found this not to be the case.  In the 2005 ruling against Ohio, the Court concluded that prohibiting payment per signature would increase the costs and the time necessary to obtain the required signatures. The Court also rejected the evidence that this particular form of payment resulted in fraud.

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