LETTER: Against Legislators' Supporting Ballot Initiatives

To the Editor:

Legislators who advocate for ballot initiatives either don’t understand their job or don’t want to do it. Making laws is not easy.  It involves the hard work of understanding existing legislation, analyzing the nuances of the issue, crafting a bill that effects the most good while doing the least harm, providing opportunity for comments from the public and affected interest groups, and then convincing other legislators of the proposed bill’s wisdom.

Legislators are elected to do a job and to represent us in doing so. Throwing an issue to the voting public in the form of a ballot initiative is an abdication of those responsibilities.

Unfortunately, my representative, Sarah Anderson, doesn’t get that. Instead she has been in lockstep with her Republican colleagues to put serious Constitutional issues on November’s ballot as a cynical attempt to circumvent the legislative process and engage in wedge politics.

She apparently doesn’t know that our founding fathers could have formed the United States as a true democracy, but in their wisdom they didn’t. Instead, they created a representative democracy where we elect representatives to do the hard work of legislating on our behalf. If she does understand that, then she has chosen not to do her job. Either way, she is unfit to serve.

Kelly Guncheon

Plymouth