My previous post on this subject constituted, in part, a prediction of the electoral results on November 4, but it was getting late when I wrote it, so I never got very far (although my predictions proved true). Writing now on certain of the other results, now that we have a complete portrait of what passed (as far as ballot referenda) and what didn't, I can make some much more definitive statements:
1. The passage of ballot question 1, invalidating automatic increases of the gasoline tax in the Commonwealth against the rate of inflation, measured (I presume) by the Consumer Price Index, will be detrimental to public investments in transportation infrastructure. As a long term matter in the relationship between private capital investment and maintenance of transportation infrastructure conforming to the needs of industry in the Commonwealth, the passage of question 1 will no doubt negatively impact economic growth in Massachusetts in ways that will not be offset by any savings to consumers and businesses from maintaining the potential for lower gasoline taxes. It is important to note just what ballot referendum question 1 actually means now that it is law. It does not change the current gas tax in the Commonwealth (approximately 42 cents per gallon of gasoline). Nor does it mandate that the General Court of the Commonwealth (i.e. our bicameral state legislature) shall not pass new increases in the gasoline tax. Rather, it invalidates a process, previously passed by the legislature, intended to increase the absolute value of the tax per gallon of gasoline automatically as a function of changes in price inflation, measured, I believe, by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index. With this in mind, the Commonwealth has a significant backlog of transportation infrastructure projects requiring the attention of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT). Each of these projects will strain the resources available to the Mass. DOT, from the gas tax and from distributions out of the General Fund of the Commonwealth not otherwise earmarked for transportation expenditures. Apparently the Patrick administration entered in 2009 facing over 600 bridges with significant structure deficiencies requiring the attention of state transportation officials. Over its time in office, the administration successfully remediated approximately 150 of these structurally deficient bridges, including the Pearl Harbor Veterans Memorial Bridge over the mouth of the Connecticut River Oxbow separating Northampton from Easthampton that I ride over at least four times a week by bus. At present, at least one bridge over the Connecticut down river in Holyoke (connecting the Holyoke Flats to the Chicopee neighborhood of Willamansett along route 116) remains closed by catastrophic structural deficiencies and an apparent paucity of state funds necessary to effect a repair/reconstruction of the bridge. In this manner, over 450 structurally deficient bridges remain in Massachusetts, a bluer than blue Democratic state frequently (and erroneously) labeled "Taxachusetts." This situation should be unacceptable, except to individuals who do not live in either of the low income neighborhoods that frequently utilized the bridge in Holyoke and, as such, who would prefer to pay less in taxes every time they go to the pump to fill up on what remains, on a global scale, relatively inexpensive gasoline. Acknowledging that expressed legislative increases in the gasoline tax by the General Court remains an option to restore necessary funds that might have been generated through automatic gas tax increases, several problems arise from an incremental legislative approach. Most notably, the Democratic majority legislature is now confronting an incoming Republican gubernatorial administration, committed to restraining the legislature in its efforts to raise new revenues for the Commonwealth through taxation. It is likely that any effort to incrementally increase the gasoline tax to pay for road repairs would have to overcome a veto from Governor Baker by means of a two-thirds majority in both houses. Even before we arrive at this point, however, it is certain that legislative initiatives to raise the gasoline tax would be met by challenges by consumer and business lobby groups, seeking to maintain an atmosphere conducive to robust contemporary consumer spending, even at the expense of passing on massive bills for transportation repairs to future administrations. It goes without saying, I think the passage of question 1, a referendum question that I felt certain would pass, represents another episode in the irresponsibility of a short-sighted electorate in directing the government of the Commonwealth on fiscal policy - if we want roads and if roads are important to future economic development when the absence of good roads becomes a hindrance to investment in the manufacture and transhipment of goods, then, as citizens, we have to develop mechanisms to pay for their construction, repair, and general maintenance! In this respect, we, citizens of the Commonwealth, collectively dropped the ball in approving this referendum question rather than permitting a thoroughly sensible policy on the regulation of gasoline taxes in the Commonwealth to stand.
2. I remain indifferent on the failure to pass ballot question 2, instituting a 5 cent deposit on plastic bottled water and juice containers, notwithstanding the fact that I voted in favor of passage. The proponents of the question, in my view, made a compelling argument that large proportions of these classes of plastic containers continue to make it into the non-recycled waste stream even with the availability of curbside recycling in most Massachusetts communities. On the other hand, as someone employed in retail trade, the complications that an expansion of the range of products carrying a deposit requirement might have produced seem to suggest that it would be better to devise solutions to the problem of plastic bottle disposal into the waste stream through the management of recycling processes by municipalities. Emphatically, I truly did not care one way or the other as to whether this question had passed or not. I voted in favor simply because arguments made by supporters of the question that a majority of plastic containers for bottled water continues to find its way into the waste stream, terminating at landfills, seemed compelling to me. I am not a strong environmentalist - environmental maintenance is not my main issue in walking into a voting booth. However, I can understand the motivations behind supporters of the proposal and the passion with which they advocate for changes in the law that might succeed in making even small changes to the management of wastes and recyclable materials. The other side on this question, represented most strongly by major retailers who did not want to see the impact of increasing the cost of bottled water and juices on their sales of these products, made a compelling and well financed case to voters that the passage of the question would increase the costs to consumers for purchasing bottled water and juice and that it might conceivably open the door to inclusion of other recyclable containers under the bottle bill. In the end, as with question 1, cost considerations to consumers won the day. The other piece in this debate over the expansion of the Massachusetts bottle bill involved the availability of curbside recycling in most municipalities in the state. It is, likewise, the case that municipalities derive a small quantity of revenues from the sale of recyclable materials to processers, who thereafter convert used plastic bottles into synthetic fleece and other products. Fundamentally, the debate over question 2 could have resolved itself into a choice in public policy between two distinct models of recycling of a discrete range of plastic containers. If curbside recycling is failing to recover a significant percentage of the plastic water and juice containers in the Commonwealth, then maybe there are things that can be done to increase the utilization of curbside recycling to shift more plastic out of the waste stream. Moreover, maybe more can be done at progressive stages in waste processing to ensure that recyclables get extracted - private waste processers like Waste Management seem to be enhancing their own profits by extracting wastes that can be renewed in other supply chains. As such, I am not highly concerned with the failure to pass question 2. Environmentalists in the Commonwealth are right to pursue this existing problem of inadequacies in recycling of plastic containers, but we need a more innovative and, perhaps, a profit/revenue generating approach to realize a solution.
3. In the intermediate term, the failure to pass question 3, banning casino gaming in the Commonwealth, will be an unmitigated disaster for Massachusetts. Casino gaming will, above all, promote a redistribution of gambling dollars away from the Massachusetts state lottery, an important source of local funding for municipalities, and toward corporations located outside of the Commonwealth - a redistribution that will absolutely not be counterbalanced by mandatory payments from casino operators to the state government and municipalities, at least in the intermediate term. In the long term, however, such a redistribution may not matter, once casino operators in Massachusetts succumb to the inadequate scale of the New England market for gambling - I find it difficult to believe that a majority of the Massachusetts gaming facilities heretofore licensed by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission will survive a decade in operation within the New England market. The casino question in Massachusetts is far too complicated for me to encapsulate the terms of the debate that raged until November 4, when a majority of the electorate that cast votes chose to maintain an expanded gaming law, passed by the General Court in 2010, that provided for the licensing of three resort casinos (one for metropolitan Boston, one for Western Massachusetts, one for Southeastern Massachusetts) and one slot parlor. Question 3, if it had been passed, would have invalidated the extended gaming law, after a range of potential casino operators had paid fees of $400,000 apiece to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission for initial consideration of their proposals and after three casino licenses had been granted by the Gaming Commission (to MGM Resorts International for development of a resort casino in the south end neighborhood of Springfield, to Penn National Gaming Inc. for a slot parlor (no table games) in Plainville, and to Wynn Resorts for development of a resort casino on a brownfield industrial site in Everett in the Boston suburbs). It is worth noting that the supporters of question 3 undertook a significant struggle just to get the referendum included on the ballot in which Massachusetts Attorney General and unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley had ruled that the question could not even appear on the ballot because its provisions would constitute an illegal uncompensated seizure of the property of potential casino operators if it had passed. I will save comments on this challenge and the legal process that supporters had to go through in order to get question 3 on the ballot for a subsequent elaboration on this post. It suffices to say that supporters, in the run up to the election, expended $650,000 in support of the invalidation of the Expanded Gaming Act, while potential casino operators and their supporters expended over $14 million to explain, in television commercials that bombarded voters across the Commonwealth, how the passage of question 3 would cost Massachusetts communities thousands of jobs anticipated in the construction process and in the subsequent staffing of casinos, stiffling the hopes of the communities hosting a potential casino operator. Thus, a majority (59 percent) of Massachusetts voters were sold on the idea that casino gaming was the best possible scheme to achieve rapid and sustained job growth in a handful of communities ravaged by unemployment and, in Everett's case, ecological devastation (Wynn has pledged to spend millions of dollars to rehabilitate the industrially polluted land on which it has been permitted to construct its casino resort(!?)).
The consequences of question 3's failure are worth significant consideration. Being the sort of economist who wants to mount an inquiry on multiple timeframes to ponder the particular ways in which a given economic policy or development is going to impact a macroeconomic system over time, it seems likely that all of the communities that have been granted casino licenses will enjoy strong near term (1-3 years) job growth by virtue of employment growth in the construction trades. Likewise, the government of the Commonwealth, the specific communities within which casinos are to be located, and certain surrounding communities that have negotiated future compensatory payments from casino operators or have been granted compensatory payments through arbitration will enjoy a stream of payments from future casino operators as agreed upon under the terms of the Expanded Gaming Law and the particular terms of licenses granted by the Gaming Commission. Finally, until the casinos and slot parlors actually go on line, Massachusetts is not going to witness any effect on revenues generated by the state lottery, the distributions from which go overwhelmingly to municipalities as local funding. In the near term, I, therefore, accept that this is going to be an economic boon for the Commonwealth.
The part that concerns me regards what I am going to label the intermediate term (4-10 years). Once the casinos come on line, the state lottery will, indisputably, begin to take a hit that it has not sustained from the Connecticut tribal casinos that have operated since the early 1990s for the simple reason that these casinos have not been here. Proximity to potential patrons, especially low income ones, that have heretofore been less likely to spend money on a sustained frequency in Connecticut casinos will immediately place a strain on lottery revenues in casino communities, because casino gaming and lottery gambling are certainly substitute goods when the casino is in your immediate vicinity. There is no way that lottery revenues as a whole, throughout the Commonwealth, are not going to be diminished, and this diminution is going to impact every community in the Commonwealth by virtue of the particular distributional formulas for local funding from the lottery. As a result, the presence of casinos will place a strain on municipal budgets throughout the Commonwealth, not specifically for the reasons cited by casino opponents (e.g. increases in criminal activity and public expenditures to deal with compulsive gambling) but simply because municipalities are not going to see the same level of locally earmarked lottery funding. The reductions in local funding that this will entail will certainly be felt in educational assistance to offset deficiencies in property tax revenues in municipalities like Springfield, which, not incidentally, will enjoy the prospect of revenues to be paid by MGM contingent to host community agreement (see "Concise Summary of Host Community Agreement," at: http://www3.springfield-ma.gov/planning/fileadmin/Planning_files/CONCISE_SUMMARY_OF_HCA_FOR_VOTERS_EMP__5_16_13_FINAL2.pdf)
with the city.
On the other hand, revenues paid by casino operators, like every other form of governmental revenue extracted from the revenues of private enterprise, is contingent on the profitability of the enterprises. If the casino that MGM plans to construct in Springfield is not profitable, then how is it possible that Springfield and surrounding communities with whom MGM has reached agreement on payments for mitigation of the negative impacts from casino development will see the millions of dollars promised by MGM? The host community agreement approved by voters in Springfield in 2013, for example, includes calculations for variable projected annual payments to the city from estimated "gross gaming revenues (GGR)" by the MGM resort casino of $479,500,000(?!). If a figure like this does not raise at least an eyebrow, then it should! The only thing Springfield can absolutely be certain of is that MGM is going to bleed low income populations in the North End, South End, Mason Square, Pine Point, McKnight, and Forest Park neighborhoods white and then go looking for easy pickings from low income populations in West Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke on the promise of easy money for the taking from populations that have no business whatsoever throwing whatever incomes they have away to billionaires from Las Vegas! Beyond its first year in operation, I find it distinctly unlikely that a Springfield casino will draw heavily from Vermont and/or New Hampshire. Nor do I think it is likely that it will draw heavily for very long from either northern Connecticut or Worcester County. The patrons of a Springfield casino will come overwhelmingly from the Massachusetts I-91 corridor (Hamden, Hampshire, Franklin Counties) and secondarily from Berkshire County. In the event that New York begins licensing casino operators for the Catskills or Taconic Parkway areas, the patronage of Berkshire County gamblers may, further, become contested. Such a population is not adequate to make Springfield a vibrant, exciting casino resort destination. In fact, I think it is still open to question whether MGM ever actually opens up a casino in Springfield, provided the tepid economic recovery currently happening in the U.S. sputters to a halt with some major international financial slowdown or shock in the next two years, something that I think is quite possible.
Whatever actually happens in Springfield and in the rest of Massachusetts over the next three to five years, I think that it is certain that opening up two to three resort casinos (a third casino resort, possibly to be operated by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe if it can maintain a federal claim to tribal status and the right to operate a gaming facility in southeastern Massachusetts may also be licensed as well by the Gaming Commission, but I am not entirely clear on the status of the Commonwealth's negotiations with the tribe) plus a large slot parlor in Massachusetts is going to place extreme stress on the base of demand for gaming facilities in New England. As it stands, I find it improbable that the Narragansett Twin River Casino in Rhode Island (which is, if memory serves, just a slot parlor plus non-gaming attractions and shopping) will survive more than two years of competition with the Penn National slot parlor located strategically on the I-95/I-495 corridor between Boston and Providence, to say nothing of the Wynn casino in Everett. Succinctly, either the Penn National slot parlor or the Narragansett slot parlor will disappear very rapidly, because the presence of both guarantees that neither will be profitable, whether either facility survives the operation of the Wynn casino in metropolitan Boston. In the past week, moreover, the Mohegan tribal commission (i.e. the Mohegan Sun Casino) has apparently begun discussions with both the state of Connecticut and the Mashantucket Pequot tribal commission (i.e. the Foxwoods Casino) to solicit approval and cooperation, respectively, in construction of a new gaming facility for northern Connecticut, targeting the same I-91 corridor that MGM is counting on for patrons. In short, southern New England is succumbing to a feeding frenzy(!) among casino operators, all seeking to gobble up as much market share as they can from a regional market that is admittedly growing but that will forever remain finite and smaller than any of the casino operators might hope.
In such an environment, is it even possible that all of the Massachusetts casino operators will remain in operation long enough to see a positive rate of return on their investments? Pursuing the contours of my larger argument in this short set of comments, my answer is no. MGM, most certainly, is not going to survive a decade in Springfield - its potential market area is too small and not wealthy enough to enable MGM to capitalize on an overly exuberant initial investment. Both Penn National and Twin River will succumb to the combined force of competition with Wynn and the southeastern Connecticut tribal casino complex (the only reason up until now that Twin River has not been competed out of business by Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun is its relatively proximity to both the Providence and Boston markets - when Wynn goes in, Twin River goes down!). The Connecticut tribal casinos will certainly lose market share, but their relative proximity to Hartford and New Haven, to say nothing of the New York metropolitan region, will help them preserve a diminished first mover advantage into the New England market. If they construct a facility in northern Connecticut, however, they will create pointless competition for their existing facilities that will never generate a meaningful rate of return, even after MGM finally throws in the towel on Springfield. In this environment, I cannot see what would be gained for the Mashpee Wampanoags if they were to get approval from the Commonwealth to build a casino resort facility in Taunton. Such a market area would draw a tiny clientele that would never generate meaningful returns for the tribe in relation to the necessary investment to create a facility that would command at least some attention from gamblers in Boston and Providence. In the end, the only prospective casino project that would appear to be of any value and genuinely profitable is that of the Wynn corporation in Everett.
With all these considerations in mind, in the long run (10+ years), maybe lottery revenues in certain parts of the Commonwealth, like Springfield, will begin to recover somewhat from the mess that supporters of casino gaming and casino operators will have placed them in. In any case, I am confident that another empty big glass building will decorate the Springfield skyline where once stood the hope and dream of 3,000 jobs for local residents and $26 million in annual revenues flowing into the coffers of the city and its neighbors. The coming casino debacle in Massachusetts will leave communities like Springfield once more with the interminable quandry of how to achieve durable economic development. Perhaps, after the casino is gone, they will come up with the answer!
4. Of all the ballot questions, the passage of question 4, mandating paid sick leave of up to forty hours per year for paid employees of businesses with more than eleven full-time-equivalent employees in the Commonwealth, was most heartening to me. While other conceivable mechanisms exist to make the imposition of a sick leave requirement on small businesses less onerous, the basic introduction of a paid sick leave privileges for workers represents a step forward in the maintenance of public health standards, especially in medical, food service, and retail food industries. I work at a business that sells food products, particular meats. Until the passage of question 4, I have never had paid sick leave at my job. While the details on the enforcement of question 4 remain somewhat open, in my understanding, I am hopeful that, for those two or three days out of the year when I am feeling like death warmed over, I may have the opportunity to call in sick with the expectation that I will still be paid for the day. The passage of this ballot initiative struck me, more than for any of the other questions, as a matter of common sense (not that, given my pedegree as a post-structuralist/post-modernist Marxian theorist, I should believe in common sense) - if only for reasons of public health, it is a bad thing to place workers in industries like retail food trades, food services, and medical services (especially personal care assistants and other low skilled medical aids that often lack such benefits) in a position where they must work even if they are sick and possibly contagious from an infection like influenza. Having said this, there are obvious problems with a mandate of paid sick leave for workers in many small businesses. Any intervention by government into the workings of labor markets to create costly new benefits for employees places stress on the revenues of small businesses, particularly in industries with relatively small margins of profitability. To articulate the argument from a Marxian perspective, the law will create new mandatory distributive claims on the mass of surplus values appropriated by small capitalist entrepreneurs, not compensated by the labor of sick employees. In view of this circumstance, it is certain that at least some small and medium scale employers will seek diverse legal avenues to divest themselves of the need to provide paid sick leave. Chief among such approaches is the reclassification of employees as independent contractors, ineligible for mandatory benefits otherwise available to employees. On the other hand, in cases where employers have done their best to follow the letter of the law in providing paid sick leave, there will certainly be cases of abuse by employees, taking days off after nights of heavy drinking or other irresponsible jestures, committed in the knowledge that paid sick leave is a mandatory benefit. When I first started discussing question 4 with my coworkers at the store (to say nothing about my employers), their reaction was to reiterate the argument that too many people would abuse paid sick leave at the expense of employers trying to do their best to survive an endless stream of onerous and costly labor market mandates by the Commonwealth.
These arguments deserve serious appraisal. In general, it is worth considering how a benefit like paid sick leave can be confered on employees in the Commonwealth without placing the cost entirely on the backs of employers, thus making Massachusetts a still less "business friendly" environment. I do not personally have a complete answer for this question, but it would seem worthwhile to consider methods to compensate businesses of a certain scale of operation (i.e. based on annual revenues) for provision of paid sick leave through the tax code. Until such a remedial measure is implemented, the margin of support for question 4 (61 percent in favor of paid sick leave) suggests that the public health benefits of enabling employees to claim sick days as a privilege of employment in the Commonwealth seems to strike a chord for fairness with the electorate, however imperfect any effort by the state to intervene in labor market institutions actual is.
5. The struggle by supporters of ballot question 3 to satisfy the requirements for consideration by voters highlights the fact that Massachusetts needs a more open process for certification of ballot referenda in order to facilitate a wider range of legislative and constitutional initiatives by direct approval by the electorate as a sovereign democratic polity. In this sense, I adamantly oppose the perspective that the presence of ballot referenda, per se, to augment or directly oppose legislative or constitutional enactments of the state legislature represents a failure of the democratic process in the Commonwealth. The issue at stake here is the definition of democracy and its relationship to governmental institutions and, in particular, the exercise of the legislative capacity of representative government. Emphatically, in my view, democracy is simply not a form of government per se, in the sense of an organizational framework and a formalized set of relationships between private individuals/citizens and governmental entities. Democracy is a philosophy of collective self-governance, bound up with a continuous active sense of belonging between individual citizens in the collectivity within which they are sovereign. To whatever extent it may be favorable for democratic citizens to establish a government, as a dependent intermediary continuously subject to the will of the sovereign, such an institution is grafted onto the existence of a democratic sovereign. That is to say, governments are established to accomplish administrative and legislative functions that might be onerous for the democratic sovereign to accomplish insofar as the sovereign is the collectivity (i.e. all of the citizens, committed to the recognition that their collective will to self-government, in the absence of any institution of the state, is the highest law), and it may be difficult to convene the sovereign every time we need to ask what the schedule will be for garbage collection or whether peanuts should be excluded from school lunches in deference to the existence of peanut allergies among school children. The fact that delegating everyday tasks and even more complex matters with long term consequences for citizens is convenient never transforms the institution of formal government into a delegation of sovereignty by which citizens become subjects of a sovereign government. That is to say, just because we elect legislators to enact legislation is our best interest, that does not mean that a legislature ever enjoys a status of sovereign - it exists at the pleasure of the collective body of citizens who retain the right, as sovereign, to amend or abolish the actions undertaken by government or even to abolish the government per se. The sovereign continuously stands over government.
Having taken a detour into classic Rousseauean civic republican thought, if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is to maintain its existence as a democracy, constituted not by the institution of its government but by the continuously renewed collectivity of its citizens as a sovereign body underlying the government and conferring legitimacy on its actions, then, beyond the basic requisite of representative government through electoral processes, democracy demands that citizens retain a collective mechanism to act as the sovereign over government in relation to particular areas of policy. The citizens of the Commonwealth need particular formal mechanisms through which we, as a collective body, can issue commands to the government on particular policies and expect to be obeyed. Succinctly, this is my rationale for arguing the legitimacy of the referendum process and, further, for arguing that the process needs to be amended in order to make it easier for groups of citizens in the Commonwealth to place referenda on the ballot and to, effectively, govern over the government on particular designated areas of policy. If we could not do so, then Massachusetts would cease to be a democracy and the government of the Commonwealth would cease to command its particular rationale for existence through its connection to the collective body of citizens as sovereign. To argue, thus, that the referendum process is, in some way, a mere remedial instrument, on the books only to correct gross failures on the part of the General Court to legislate in the interests of citizens on a particular area of policy, amounts to an impoverishment in the conception of the democratic process in Massachusetts (for an example of this perspective, see: "Editorial: A "no" vote is best on Question 4," Springfield Republican (30 Oct. 2014), at: http://www.masslive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/10/editorial_a_no_vote_is_the_bes.html).
There are legitimate critiques that can and should be made in regard to the referendum process in the Commonwealth, as well as the representative electoral process. It might be true that the drafting of referendum questions fails to adequately respect the complexity of various policy questions. It is certainly difficult to approach particular complex issues with truncated proposals, of a circumscribed length to fit on an electoral ballot. Likewise, the referendum process is certainly subject to all of the abuses evident in the interjection of monied interests into politics. It is worth asking what social benefit accrued to the expenditure of $14 million by the casino gaming industry to defeat question 3. On the other hand, the same criticism can be made about electoral politics in general - candidates for governmental offices expend steadily increasing masses of monetary resources to get elected. The only remedies for such abuses exist in truncating the free speech privileges of individuals and corporate entities with regard to the democratic process, something that the U.S. Surpreme Court (for good or for ill) currently appears committed to preventing. As such, I prefer to live with massive expenditures of money for and against referenda than to dispense with the referendum process altogether or subject it to even the current constraints on the use of ballot referenda as a means of enacting legislation.
Concluding, the struggle by the group Repeal the Casino Deal to place question 3 on the ballot is evocative of the problems that I have with the limited role exercised by ballot referenda in Massachusetts. Specifically, having collected a threshold quantity of signatures to place a referendum on the repeal of the Expanded Gaming Act of 2010 on the 2014 ballot, Repeal the Casino Deal was forced to file a judicial appeal with the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth against the decision by Attorney General Martha Coakley that the passage of repeal to the Expanded Gaming Act would amount to an illegal taking of the property of prospective casino operators without compensation. It succeeded in its efforts to have this decision overruled, but the fact that ballot referenda must stand up to the constitutional scrutiny of the Attorney General's office or that of the General Court implies that the very means afforded under the Massachusetts Constitution for citizens, as a collective sovereign, to legislate over their government, must submit to the sovereign authority of the Constitution itself. Either the citizens of Massachusetts are sovereign or our Constitution is - it cannot be both. If for no other reason, the referendum process in Massachusetts needs to be revised in order to remove such Constitutional blockages to expressions of the sovereign will of the voters.
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