ALEIGH – It is now (more or less) settled: Wednesday will be the day that a proposed state lottery in North Carolina will finally get a hearing on the House floor.
Actually, it isn’t the lottery per se that’s getting a hearing. It’s the idea of holding a “nonbinding” referendum in November. The debate on this idea today in the House Rules Committee was brief, infuriating, and pointless. Rep. Bill Owens, chief sponsor of the bill, explained that the “people should express their opinion” on the controversial issue. He made the usual misstatements of fact (claiming that a lottery would bring in $400 million a year, which is inflated by about a third, and that North Carolina is currently losing $250 million to other state lotteries, when the real number is about $60 million). And he made the usual pleas about how we need more money for the schoolchildren, yada, yada, yada.
Because the referendum bill says only that a vote should be held on “an Education Lottery,” several members tried to clarify what voters would actually be expressing their opinions on. Their questions were rebuffed. Owens, for example, responded to the question of how voters could be sure that lottery proceeds would go to education, since the bill required no such thing, by insisting that “it is our intention” to earmark lottery revenues to education should the public say yes in a referendum and the legislature then reconvene to pass a lottery. Uh, that’s not an answer. That’s just the question restated.
To the commonsensical point that the ballot should not contain the phrase “Education Lottery,” since it won’t necessarily be devoted to funding new education programs, Owens restated his position, again. It was the intention of lottery supporters to set up an education lottery, he said. A nonanswer, repeated, gains no explanatory power.
Then Rep. Ed McMahan, a Charlotte Republican, got in what I thought was the best line of the day. He asked why we needed to hold a referendum if Owens is correct and 70 percent of North Carolinians have already expressed in opinion polls that they favor a lottery. Owens responded that a statewide referendum would serve as a more broad-based and thus valid sampling of opinion.
On this he is embarrassingly mistaken; public opinion polls, based on randomly selected phone numbers and weighted for demographic factors, will always be a more reliable measure of overall public sentiment than elections. The reason we don’t just take polls instead of elections is that we live in a constitutional republic, and thus expect more of citizens than simply to pick up a phone and answer a few questions.
On that point, Rep. Cary Allred, one of two Republicans on the rules committee to vote for the bill (it passed the panel on a 15-13 vote), chimed in that he believed the people had the right to decide such issues. He pointed out that in 1994, his party had just won control of the N.C. House on an agenda that included a referendum and initiativeprocess for the state. The resulting bill in 1995 came just a couple votes short of passage. But Allred is mistaken if he believes that selectively carving out a single issue, a state lottery, and then holding a biased, “advisory” referendum on it is remotely similar to the Republicans’ 1995 bill.
There may well be good reasons to offer citizens a “safety valve” like an initiative process, even under a constitutional republic. All forms of government are subject to the vagaries of human nature and the corruption of special interests. But it would be grossly unfair for the state legislature to control what issues can be placed on the ballot, and in what form. The reality is that lottery proponents are unsure of the political consequences should they vote the way they feel, so they are trying to hide behind a referendum process.
Moreover, the issue has become partisan. Democrats see a November lottery referendum as a way to coax soft money out of the gambling industry to boost Democratic turnout (in circumvention of the campaign-finance laws, by the way, exposing yet another “principled position” that turns out to be little more than a political posture easily discarded when it becomes inconvenient).
Most expect a floor vote tomorrow on the lottery bill. It will be a moment of high drama.
I’m not giving odds.