Republicans just don’t like it
Bolts magazine, which is doing a great job uncovering the democratic atrocities coming out of local and state governments has a new one. Republicans in South Dakota don’t like Medicaid. So they’re underhandedly overturning the will of the voters. It’s so bad even some Republicans balked at what they’re doing:
When South Dakota organizers began gathering signatures to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in 2022, their goal seemed very achievable—they needed to win just 50 percent of the vote in the next general election. Since 2018, ballot measures to expand Medicaid met that threshold in conservative Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah—victories that qualified hundreds of thousands of people for public health insurance.
Healthcare advocates pursued a ballot initiative to get around their Republican-run legislature, which has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act for the past decade. But state Republicans have responded by rushing to change the election’s rules.
The legislature placed a constitutional amendment on the state’s June 7 primary ballot that would make it far harder for future ballot initiatives to succeed, starting with the Medicaid measure that is scheduled on Nov. 8.
Amendment C, if adopted next week by the smaller pool of voters who decide primaries, would set a higher threshold for future ballot measures that involve spending more than $10 million over a period of five years—something that expanding Medicaid would inevitably do. Such ballot measures would need to gain the approval of 60 percent of voters, up from 50 percent.
The GOP’s bid to thwart the Medicaid initiative in South Dakota adds to a series of moves by the party to weaken direct democracy. In many states that Republicans dominate, progressive organizers have successfully appealed to voters with measures like Medicaid expansion that conservative legislatures have blocked, triggering intense backlash by Republican politicians against procedures of direct democracy that they are failing to control. In Idaho and Utah, the GOP’s new restrictions on ballot initiatives also closely followed Medicaid referendums.
The erosion of direct democracy resonates deeply in South Dakota, which was the first state in the nation to set-up a popular initiative process. Inspired by Progressive Era demands for new checks on politicians, the state’s 1898 reform empowered ordinary citizens to initiate ballot initiatives and it has been used expansively ever since.
Just over the past decade, South Dakotans have approved initiatives to raise the minimum wage, create an independent ethics commission, and legalize cannabis.
Republican politicians have responded by gradually restricting the initiative process. In 2016, voters adopted the South Dakota Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act, which set new ethics rules and created a system for public financing of political campaigns. Republican politicians repealed the measure, arguing that voters didn’t understand what was in it when they passed it.
The legislature then crafted two measures to make it harder for voters to initiate initiatives. The first would have required all constitutional amendments to receive 55 percent of the vote to be ratified, but South Dakotans rejected the proposal in 2018. They passed the second, which requires constitutional amendments to only relate to a “single subject.” Most states with ballot initiatives have such requirements, but there is tremendous variation in how this language gets interpreted. Some state supreme courts apply it broadly and only rarely hold that a proposal violates it, while others apply it much more stringently, routinely striking down proposals.
South Dakotans quickly learned that their supreme court, made up entirely of GOP appointees, would interpret the new requirement strictly. After voters approved legalizing marijuana in 2020, Republican Governor Kristi Noem challenged the constitutionality of the measure, and the state’s high court struck it down for encompassing more than one subject in November.
State Republicans further escalated their war on popular initiatives last year with a law that increases the font size of ballot petitions while requiring that the entire text fit on one page. This has made the organizing effort to gather signatures far less practical.
South Dakota advocates still managed to qualify an initiative to expand Medicaid, which would provide coverage to tens of thousands of low-income South Dakotans, for the November ballot.
But those same advocates have had to turn their attention to fighting next week’s Amendment C, the measure that increases the threshold for initiatives. Dakotans for Health, a group organizing for Medicaid, opposes the measure. Other groups have also come out against it, including the South Dakota Municipal League, several major health systems, and the state chamber of commerce.
Some Republicans have explicitly acknowledged that they scheduled Amendment C for the June ballot to stall November’s Medicaid expansion proposal.
Conservative anti-tax groups, including Americans for Prosperity, the organization founded by the Koch brothers, have fueled the campaign on behalf of Amendment C. And GOP leaders like Noem are focusing on making the case that Amendment C would forestall tax hikes.
Despite the GOP’s dominance in this legislature, the state Senate barely approved scheduling Amendment C for the June ballot; it only passed the chamber on a narrow 18 to 17 vote, with many Republicans balking at the proposal. Republican Senator Mike Diedrich said he backed the goal of Amendment C but opposed placing it on the ballot in June. As KELO-TV reported, Diedrich argued that it was “bad faith to cut off the process” that the ballot organizers “entered into in good faith” and was “unfair to the people who are following the laws.”
It’s bad faith to thwart the will of the people. But at least he sees the element of cheating that’s going on. Not that it makes a difference. Their compatriots won. And they know they will all benefit from it. These little blips of conscience don’t add up to much.