Unlimited Terms of Endearment Part XX: The Unedited PBS Interview

1. How did you first get alerted to this story?

I got a political mailing: bulk mail, grey envelope with a return address in Illinois. When I opened it, I saw that it was a letter and a petition and asked me to get signatures to put term limits on the ballot ... again.

I'm too much of a google monkey to let something like that go, and when I started to try and find out what that group in Illinois was, every answer raised ten more questions. I kept digging and here we are.

2. What were the initiatives being proposed in Oregon? What kind of local support did these ideas have?

Measure 39 - restricts use of Eminent Domain ("Government Can't Steal My Property And Give It To A Developer Act" -- original filing title)

Measure 45 - term limits for Oregon Legislative Assembly ("Reinstate Legislative Term Limits" -- original title)

Measure 48 - Spending Cap/Rainy Day Fund ("Constitutional State Spending Limit" -- original title)

a TABOR-style initiative called the "Rainy Day" initiative that doesn't, oddly enough, establish a "Rainy Day" fund.

To the best of my knowledge, there wasn't that much grassroots support: e.g. US Term Limits/Rich gave $350,000 in 2004 to run a term limits petition drive, and they didn't come up with enough signatures to get it on the Oregon ballot.

3. From your research, what have you been able to piece together about Howard Rich and the organizations he's connected to?

I've put together more than 150 pages on it, and I commend the reader to download the .pdf I made of the first fifteen parts of the report. It's really an octopus of organizations, foundations, 501(c)3s, 501(c)4s and a network of think tanks across the country. They have a definite agenda, and they've been pushing it everywhere they can. The term limits movement (and its inclusion in the 1994 GOP "Contract With America") has its genesis in this series of interlinking organizations. See below.

4. Why do you think Rich has shown such an interest in these particular issues?

Well, I have to take him at his word. He told an OREGONIAN reporter in Chicago last month: "It's all about the ideology." Rich and his wife were the first elected officers of the New York Libertarian Party in 1973, and they've remained consistent to Ayn Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness" philosophy over the years. They walked out of the LP in 1983 (when their presidential nominee lost) but this breakaway group has been a major force behind social security privatization, deregulation (one claimed credit for writing the airline deregulation bill in the Reagan Administration) and a whole slew of anti-government and anti-tax measures. Another one they're pushing is "School Choice" which is code for ending all public education and moving to all private schools. They believe that all taxation is theft at the point of a gun, and they're seemingly out to do anything they can to carry out the old Grover Norquist (with whom they've often worked) dictum about the bathtub.

5. How would characterize the press coverage that Rich's involvement in these initiatives has gotten across the country?

The local press coverage always stops at the state line. And it's always overwhelmed, but it's been professional, and it's been good, as far as it's gone. These people have been very good at covering their tracks, and time after time, by the time the press really figures out what's going on, the election is over and it's no longer "newsworthy."

I can't fault the press for what they've done. It's a national story, and the national press needs to look at it to connect the dots. When you've got a New York real estate tycoon sending money through an office in Chicago to an organization with offices in Idaho and Montana, who, in turn, send that money on to Nebraska and Missouri, something's going on that the local press just don't have the resources to dig into and follow up on.

6. Why do you care who funds initiatives in your state? Can't you just weigh the initiative on it's face and decide if it's a good idea or not?

There is a reason that we make laws in a deliberative body. The initiative process is MEANT to be an "IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS." There are always unintended consequences, and, as we've seen several times in the past, what you THINK you're voting for, and what you're actually voting for turn out to be two different things.

When -- as in Idaho and Arkansas a couple years ago -- Howie Rich and his people outspend the local opposition five to one and more, I can't see that anything other than hard-core used-car sales techniques have bullied the voters into taking up questions that legislatures are more properly constituted to address. This is just an "up or down" vote with very little to no real deliberation, and a lot of local political fisticuffs. There's no opportunity to fix an initiative, amend it, etc. That's why they should be used rarely.

You'd think that the people pushing it would have the good grace to live in the place that's going to face the consequences. And maybe even reveal who they actually are. Democracy is about accountability, and non-accountability is its antithesis.

In deciding on constitutional issues, knowing who's pushing it is not only important, but there is something fundamentally suspicious if they're hiding who they are, and don't even have a dog in the fight.

7. In the end, do you think that voters will care who's backing these initiatives?

I hope that they will. Everyone I talk to cares when they find out what's behind it. Maybe that is why there has been a conscious pattern of faking local support and hiding behind highfalutin' "group" acronyms.

I think that self-government and home rule are very precious rights, and the idea of a bunch of secretive zillionaires hiding behind any number of "fronts" and using my state as a petrie dish for their "democracy" experiments is not something that most people cotton to. As they say in that salsa commercial: "NEW YORK CITY!!?!?"

8. What's your take on the ballot initiative process itself? They're clearly controversial: many people love them for their ability to put the power of lawmaking directly into the hands of citizens, and many others hate them for the very same reason. Where do you come down?

The first ballot initiative was voted on here in Oregon in 1904. (South Dakota passed the first initiative law, which the Oregon "blue book" conveniently ignores). They were originally a necessary check on the power of a few powerful robber barons to block pieces of legislation that a clear majority of citizens considered necessary and proper.

When initiatives are used that way, I think they're a fine thing.

But in the past decade or so, we've seen that flipped on its ear: the robber barons use it to block the legislature instead. The whole thing is upside down. At the ALG 'conference' in Chicago last month, one speaker said that even if they lose, they still win, because they block people they disagree with in that (my) state from proposing measures of their own -- because they have to spend all their resources "playing defense."

Or to quote from High Country News reporter Ray Ring's amazing interview with Howie Rich (akin this season to interviewing a recluse on the order of J.D. Salinger), Rich himself states:

"I'm far more interested in initiatives. The initiative process enables you to bypass the legislature ...."

I think that says it all.

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Hart Williams' bio:

Hart Williams grew up in Wyoming and graduated from Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He attended Texas Christian University and moved to Hollywood, California in 1976.

Mr. Williams has been a professional writer since 1976, published since 1973. He has written for newpapers and magazines from the Washington POST to the Los Angeles TIMES and FREE PRESS, The Kansas City STAR, Portland OREGONIAN, NEW WEST, OUI, Los Angeles Magazine, the Santa Fe SUN, and more. A published novelist and screenwriter, he lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife - a science fiction author in her own right - her centenarian father and their manx cat.