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THE CHAIRMAN : Delegate Winslow.
DELEGATE WINSLOW: Delegate
Boyer, my position today is exactly as it
was when I appeared before the Commis-
sion. I do not know that I have changed
any, except perhaps that I have become a
little more harsh, for I think I did not at
that time suggest that not more than one-
fourth of the petition should come from
any one county.
I am very serious about this one-fourth.
I do not want amendments to pop up all
over the place. I want this to be used only
in very extreme cases where other ways of
getting amendments seem to be impossible.
THE CHAIRMAN: Delegate Boyer, do
you desire to speak either in favor or in
opposition to the amendment?
DELEGATE BOYER: Mr. Chairman, I
have no strong feeling on this one way or
another. I would like to report what the
Committee, however, had adopted. We had
considered the matter of inclusion of ini-
tiative, and there were eight reasons why
we did not adopt it.
Number one, we felt that the mandatory
provision for calling a convention every
twenty-five years, if desired by the people,
was a safeguard. We felt that the elec-
torate should not necessarily control the
legislature. We felt that there was a
danger of the initiative petition by special
interest groups. We felt that the shortened
constitution leaves detail to the legislature,
and therefore the amendment to change
detail was not necessary. We felt that a
properly apportioned legislature could be
trusted to reflect the demands of the people.
We felt that unified control drafting a
written law should remain in the legisla-
ture. We felt that the initiative of legisla-
tion was defeated by the Convention. We
lastly felt that the right of the people to
pass on the proposed amendments was re-
tained, and therefore that the direct initia-
tive by the people was not necessarily an
emergency measure. For these reasons, for
the arguments against the inclusion of ini-
tiative, we declined to put it in our GP-7.
As I say, I have no strong position on
it, either necessarily for it or opposed to
it, but I thought that to help enlighten the
Committee of the Whole I should bring
out these eight reasons why the Committee
did consider it and decided not to adopt it.
THE CHAIRMAN : Does any other dele-
gate desire to speak in favor of the
amendment?
(There was no response.)
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Is there any other delegate in opposition?
Delegate Scanlan.
DELEGATE SCANLAN: Mr. Chair-
man, fellow delegates, it always grieves me
to take a position contrary to my dis-
tinguished colleague from Baltimore County
with whom I have had the pleasure of
service on the Constitutional Convention
Commission before which Commission he
advanced the idea now reflected in Amend-
ment No. 2.
I always feel that the positions I should
take to agree with him are the positions
I would have taken many years ago in
my political science courses in Columbia,
where I gave the answers that agreed with
the position taken by Delegate Boyer today
and my professors approved.
It is not always the conservatives who
do not learn by the lesson of experience. I
think sometimes the liberals and idealists
do not. The ideal of initiative is a hold-
over from the great days of George L.
Morris and the liberalism of that day, but
the experience of the years has shown that
the initiative can be subject to the gravest
abuse, and the most recent manifestation of
that was in California on the open housing
referendum there.
Today only thirteen states retain it, and
even most of them require that when
enough signatures are gathered the peti-
tion must be filed with the General Assem-
bly or the legislature at its next session
so the legislature would have an oppor-
tunity either to accept it and put it on the
ballot in regular form, or to reject it.
The proposal before you does not go that
far.
Secondly, when legislatures were malap-
portioned, when they truly did not repre-
sent the people, when there was no concept
of one man one vote in most of the states
of this nation, I think there was a certain
validity for providing a means to break
the log jam, but even there I do not believe
the initiative was used successfully in one
single state to break the log jam of mal-
apportionment.
Malapportionment, at least in the legis-
latures of the land, is behind us, and the
people now are represented by their rep-
resentatives at the state capital as we are
in Maryland.
The amending procedures proposed by the
Committee are very liberal. First you have
the three-fifths traditional procedure, and
secondly in their next proposal you will
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