Some of the hallway discussions at CPAC have focused on the plight of Paul Jacobs, a leading light and promoter of term limits. Jacobs, a founder of the organization U.S. Term Limits, was a leading candidate for the so-called "Ronald Reagan" award, which is an annual cash prize bestowed on an exemplary conservative by the American Conservative Union Board of Directors at CPAC. This year’s winner will be announced at a dinner tonight.
Jacobs has allied with Californians more than once to promote and preserve term limits through initiatives.
Sadly, Jabobs efforts are not so appreciated in Oklahoma. He is currently under criminal indictment in the Sooner State for importing "out of state" petition gatherers to work on a state spending limit initiative. Criminal indictment.
Professional petition gathering is not a pretty business. It is not easy to find a person willing to volunteer to face exposure and rejection 2 or 3 times a minute. The people who charge for these services and actually enjoy it are rare and a special type of person. Often, in a successful petition gathering effort in an initiative state, they have to be "imported" to help where volunteers just can’t do the trick in the short time frames available under law.
In California, so-called "residency" requirements for petition gatherers are on the books in many localities as a way to localize the effort. Thus, a proposed initiative in Stanton, for example, might have to be circulated by only Stanton residents under the law. But the practical effect of such local residency requirements is to dillute the constitutional right to petition government, because there may not be many people willing to take the emotional heat and work of circulating a petition there. Thus, in a court challenge some time ago, I believe in Colorado (I am away from my law books at the moment) local residency requirements to circulate a petition were ruled unconstitutional. The status of the law now, is that a person need only be a resident of the state, and not a specific local jurisdiction, to circulate a petition, despite local restrictions to the contrary. Those laws would not be upheld in a challenge given the "stare decisis."
The Jacobs case poses a slightly different question. In that case, a state law requiring petitioner circulators of a proposed state measure to be residents of the state is in question. At issue would be whether or not there is an adequate pool of potential circulators in Oklahoma to justify the interstate restriction on the right to petition a government. It is an interesting question and one I hope will be resolved in favor of expansion of the right to petition and not the other way around. In other words, I hope Jabobs wins his case.
However, my biggest problem with this case is that it is a criminal indictment. Jacobs faces a stint in jail for simply trying to put a cap on government spending in Oklahoma. That is terribly wrong, and the punishment does not in any way fit the alleged offense.
Criminalizing the First Amendment is too often a persistent problem with local governments. In Newport Beach, failure to file a copy of an election flyer with City Hall within 2 hours of distribution in the last two weeks of a campaign is subject to six months in jail. This is also terribly wrong.
Thinking legislators should learn from Chief Justice Roberts treatment in the recent case of Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC, and I highly paraphrase, "In dealing with the First Amendment, we must err on the side of freedom." Oklahoma needs to decriminalize its petition restrictions, and Newport Beach needs to decriminalize and repeal its "hit piece" crime.