As if to provide a fuzzy journalistic counterpoint to John Fund’s clear and on-point Wall Street Journal article on “The Far Left’s War on Direct Democracy,” now we have Dan Morain and Nicholas Riccardi in the Los Angeles Times expatiating, according to the article’s headline, on how the “GOP [is] suffering from a lack of (ballot) initiative.”  Both articles ostensibly report on the same phenomenon, i.e., politically motivated monkey-wrenching of initiative rights. But Morain and Riccardi seem to shy away from the full truth.

The headline is the first indication; then we have the blurb prefacing the article, which informs us that the “strategy of pushing propositions likely to draw conservatives to the polls has faltered as Republicans face mishaps in drafting measures and a more aggressive opposition.”

It would be news to Paul Jacob and many other citizen activists that they have fought again and again for term limits, tax limits, curbs on government spending and eminent domain abuse, and other initiatives merely to advance some GOP candidate’s electoral prospects.

No doubt GOP strategists in armchairs somewhere habitually nod with approval when an initiative to cut taxes reaches the ballot, in the hopes that this will draw more voters to the ballot box who are likely to prefer Republicans to Democrats. But this is a far cry from inaugurating and driving particular ballot initiatives, which by their nature circumvent the political establishment—incumbent Republicans as much as incumbent Democrats, and to the frequent annoyance of both. In some cases, of course, there are indeed rank partisan motives for ballot initiatives. For example, whenever incumbent politicians foist a measure on the ballot to undo term limits and other curbs on their power.

Nevertheless, the LA Times article at least skates in the general vicinity of the truth. The political motivations behind the prosecution of Paul Jacob and the Oklahoma Three are proffered as one key reason so few “conservative” initiatives are making the ballot these days.

The article notes that Paul has been sidelined from initiative activity this cycle as he defends himself, but has in the past been a force behind more than 70 statewide ballot initiatives for term limits, spending control, and property rights measures. “All that stopped in November [October], though,” Dan Morain and Nicholas Riccardi report, “when Oklahoma officials arrested Jacob on charges of violating a state law that bars nonresidents from circulating petitions. So Jacob is sitting out this campaign.” The authors are, however, scrupulously agnostic about whether the assault on the Oklahoma Three’s First Amendment rights is legitimate as opposed to “bizarre” (the latter being the John Fund/WSJ view).

Morain and Riccardi also make the point, though much less incisively than Fund, that the assault on the Oklahoma Three is part and parcel of the assault on the initiative process generally, and specifically of left-wing assaults on conservative or libertarian initiatives.

The authors note that the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is “funded by billionaire George Soros and organized labor” and has run a concerted national campaign to harass supporters of conservatives measures by lawsuits as well as by hiring goons (our word) to intimidate signers and petition circulators. (BISC has also publicly cheered the prosecution of the Oklahoma Three, further evidence of the political motivation behind the prosecution that goes unnoted in the LA Times article.) They are fair enough to quote Ward Connerly’s view that the actions of petition “blockers” are “despicable,” but, unlike Fund, offer little detail about what these blockers actually do, and why, as they try to prevent voters from having their say at the ballot box.

Guess which article reported the following statement of an anti-democratic organization called BAMN:

“The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place,” says Donna Stern, Midwest director for the Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). “That’s the only way we’re going to win.” Her group’s name certainly describes the tactics that are being used to thwart [Ward] Connerly.

Right. Not the Los Angeles Times piece.