By Rob Natelson**

If you are exposed to enough politics, sooner or later you’ll hear the old saw that the U.S. is “a republic and not a democracy.” Along with that saying goes the following claim: Allowing voter initiatives and referenda is unconstitutional: If a state lets voters enact laws or veto tax hikes, the state is too democratic to meet the Constitution’s mandate that it have a “republican form of government.”

A new Independence Institute Issue Paper, which I authored, examines those assertions in detail. The Paper shows that both are essentially myths.

The nation’s best-known measure requiring voter approval of most tax hikes is Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), adopted by the voters in 1992. This Issue Paper is published in response to a legal attack on TABOR: A group of government apologists has sued in federal court claiming that by limiting legislative control over fiscal measures, Colorado has violated the U.S. Constitution.

In a nutshell, the new Issue Paper finds:

* The American Founders did not firmly distinguish between a “republic” and a “democracy.” Some used the two words as if they were synonymous. Some adopted the view of Montesquieu that there were two kinds of republics: (1) Those controlled by a few (aristocracies) and (2) those controlled by the many (democracies).

* Dictionaries of the time defined “republic” as merely a popular government, as opposed to a monarchy. One encyclopedia-type dictionary included an article tracking Montesquieu’s definitions.

* In drafting and debating the Constitution, the Founders talked a lot about republics. In most of the governments they identified as republics (like the Athenian and Roman), citizens voted on all laws.

* Various Founders stated explicitly that in republics the people could make laws directly as well as through representatives.

* The only kind of democracy the Founders thought “unrepublican” was what Madison (following Aristotle) labeled “pure democracy.” This was a theoretical form of government without officials, and where the mob ran everything in defiance of the rule of law. Other terms for the same thing are “mob rule,” “mobocracy” and “ochlocracy.”

* The dominant purpose of the Constitution’s mandate that states have republican forms of government was not to prevent popular votes at the state and local level. (In fact, referenda already were being used in some states.) The dominant purpose was to prevent any state from becoming a monarchy.

* The twin myths—that the Founders drew a sharp line between “republics” and “democracies” and that citizen lawmaking is unrepublican—did not arise until the 1840s, when conservatives invented and promoted them in response to disturbances in Rhode Island. In fact, until about 40 years ago, it was mostly conservatives who made such arguments. Beginning in the 1970s, liberals adopted them while opposing measures that give the voters “a say in what they pay.”

http://constitution.i2i.org/2012/10/26/new-ii-issue-paper-rebuts-myth-that-citizen-review-of-laws-and-taxes-violates-the-republican-form/

Rob Natelson is one of America’s best-known constitutional scholars. He was formerly a tenured law professor and the top publisher on the University of Montana law faculty, where he taught, among other subjects, Constitutional Law, Constitutional History, Advanced Constitutional Law, and First Amendment.

Rob co-authored two briefs in the Supreme Court’s 2012 health care case that appear to have served as partial sources for the portions of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion addressing the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Medicaid extension.

Although Rob became affiliated with II in 1994, it was not until 2010 that he came to the Independence Institute full time. His title is Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence. He also serves as Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Montana Policy Institute and as a Senior Fellow at Arizona’s Goldwater Institute.

http://constitution.i2i.org/about/