I am sorry your time with some of the legislator’s made you so jaded. There are plenty of characters up there in the state house, some good, some bad. However, many of them are community leaders above an beyond their position in the legislature – often sacraficing time/money and other things to be in the legislature. I know many legislators, have sat in on many committee meetings. Most tend to be reasonably well educated and informed – to a larger degree than the average S.C. resident (and they should be, that is their job). If a legislator told you to talk to “so and so” they may have been talking about the sub-committee handling your bill. In the Senate for instance, half of the senate sits on the Judiciary Committee and the other half all sit on finance, the person could have actually been directing you in the proper place. Government and government officials can be like a car sometimes – when you get in your car/truck for 500 days and drive to/from work with no issues you really don’t think about it much, but on those two days of five hundred that it breaks down or doesn’t start et cetera, you most certainly remeber it and your car is the most worthless $%^& #$%^ ever, and “why didn’t I trade this $%^&^ !@#$# two years ago!?!”

Furthermore, an initiative process like this would allow for persons to put things on the ballot of the state in confusing terms that would solely benefit their own interests but would be unitelligble to the average voter – such intiatives would never pass the legislature – but may easily be passes when the group that wants it passed has not organized oposition (like the general public), and then it just comes down to an adverstising campain – “Prop 27 will save your pets, make your children healthier, and whiten your teeth!”

This is particularly so on environmental legislation where the incentive to pollute is great (it’s expensive to clean up your own mess) and organized (it is usually a specific company or group of companies in a single trade), but the incentive to fight against lax regulations is disperse (every memeber of the general public who wants clean water, air et cetera) and therefore often not well funded.

There’s a slight problem with your sentence which includes the phrase ‘educated individuals in a thoughtful legislative process’. From my experience with legislators from all over the state, e-d-u-c-a-t-e-d is a stretch in some cases.

Take some time and read the bills and public “thank you” notes that are filed each year. While serving on a committee of a trade organization which was trying to get members of the judiciary committee to consider a bill requiring licensing for mortgage brokers (who at the time were virtually unregulated), I got a good view of the idiots we have in Columbia. Keep in mind, this was YEARS before the mortgage debacle. I tried to meet every one on the committee who attended the function, and rather than discuss our concerns, many talked about anything OTHER than the reason they were invited. Here are a few paraphrased comments I heard:

Yeah, I missed the most important vote regarding education in SC cause I to DJ an event(play records) that day. I probably could have been at both, but I would have been tired.

I don’t know enough about mortgages, cause I don’t have one; let me tell you the story about my new recliner!

I’m new; I don’t much about how any of this works yet.

You’ll need to talk to —- —— about your bill. This isn’t really in my area. (But this person was a member of the Judiciary Committee).

I don’t know how I would be able to help you. I’m just here for the dinner and drinks.

I came away from this meeting having classified our legislators into several categories:

They’re just in Columbia for the parties, free food and booze.

They new, and they don’t know sh*t about politics. Their friends just suggested they run, and they never thought they’d get elected.

They’re actually trying to improve our state.

They’re well connected, members of the good ol’ boys club, and it’s all about what I can do for them, not what they can do for me.

They make a lot of money, but they inherited it from their Daddy, so they’ve never really worked or run a business. They just needed something to do and they thought politics might be interesting.

Most are narcissistic (sic) morons, not educated individuals in a thoughtful legislative process.

Go online to http://www.sc.gov, find your legislator, and look at what they’ve been doing with your/my tax dollars. If it’s not a waste of money, it is a waste of time. And time is money.

In the matter of schools,the average taxpayer thinks that it’s okay to pay for schools that cost 10 times more than what they are worth because of all the niceties that the bureaucrats want, but adds nothing to make Johnny read better or figure better. The main beneficiaries of Gollaith size schools instead of neighborhood schools with only classrooms, an auditorium and a play yard are the bankers who loan the money, the realtors who may even be on the school board, the material suppliers and of course, always the Chanber of Commerce and the developers. The latter see to it that a school must be a drawung card for new residential development which for each new house built the cost for infrastructure support is $22,000. That’s when the legal profession puts its hand in the cookie jar fighting to limit or abolish impact fees that developers abhor. There is a suit pending that is to abolish the $2,500 impact fee on new housing which is 11.36 percent of the real infrastructure cost.

Sure the “educated individuals in a thoughtful legislative process” has served us “poor, dumb, fat, sick, unemployed, overtaxed, antiquated, corrupt and (not surprisingly) violent” so well but what the hell, let’s switch it up.

Life must really suck to be so downtrodden and brow beaten that a taxpayer doesn’t even feel entitled to an intiative process.

We don’t need to follow in California’s footsteps, as much as the wingnuts in Lexington County would like for us to. Our system is messed up enough!!!