Do we really have majority rule in the United States? Our annual extravagant foreign giveaway appropriations are about as popular as the Congressional pay raise. Neither would ever be approved by the voters. But like 01′ Man River, they just keep rollin’ along.
When we get the chance, Americans vote overwhelmingly to punish convicted murderers with the death penalty. Examples are the referendums in California in 1972 and Washington in 1975. But the U.S. Supreme Court keeps invalidating majority rule and preventing the use of the death penalty.
The Senate decision to give away our Panama Canal struck a body blow to the confidence Americans have in the democratic process. It was widely known that at least 75 percent of Americans oppose surrendering our Canal to dictator Torrijos and then paying him $2 billion more to take it.
The polls consistently show that the big majority of Americans believe that children should be allowed to pray in public schools. But after 173 years of this generally accepted practice, the Supreme Court discovered that all forms of prayer in the public schools were forbidden by the First Amendment.
Most Americans believe in equal employment and educational opportunity and therefore oppose reverse discrimination and quotas. But the Supreme Court says we must submit to them so long as they are concealed behind the semantic shibboleths of affirmative action and intermediate targets and timetables.
The majority of Americans do not want their communities degraded by pornographic movies and sex shows. Washington state in 1977 even passed an initiative to restrict pornography. But drive through busy sections of any major or even middle-sized American city today and you will see advertising displays for X-rated movies and live sex shows that would not have been tolerated even on off-beat side streets a few years ago. Many magazines featuring obscenity have been given second-class mailing privileges so that the taxpayers are subsidizing their porn.
The majority of Americans do not want the metric system, but Big Brother in Washington tells us he knows what’s best for us. That’s the same Big Brother who tells us that saccharin and Laetrile are forbidden, but tobacco and whiskey are acceptable so long as the government gets its tax bite.
In 1976 the voters in six states rejected proposals to restrict the development of nuclear power plants. But despite our energy shortage, the development of nuclear plants has been hamstrung and delayed by federal interference. Construction of the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, at Seabrook, New Hampshire, was ordered halted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after it was half built.
The cost of stopping construction is estimated at $15 million a month. Under the doctrine announced by the Supreme Court last month in the Earl L. Butz case, the Commissioners should be held personally liable for the immense loss they are deliberately causing to the Seabrook plant investors.
If the Founding Fathers thought that taxation without representation was bad, they should see taxation with representation. Estimates of fraud in federal spending run to $25 billion a year, despite the clear message from the voters that they have had enough of bureaucratic waste.
More than half the people in the United States are now supported wholly or in large part by tax dollars. Forty-four percent of our people support the 56 percent who are paid with our tax dollars, including 15,237,000 government workers and their 32,014,000 dependents, and 26,073,000 receiving public assistance including the unemployed.
It is to be hoped that California’s Proposition 13, in addition to vindicating majority rule in fiscal matters, may also generate a return to majority rule on social issues.
