State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, wants to make herself – and all of her successors – into taxpayer-financed political activists with the authority to ignore the state constitution’s most fundamental principles and to replace the will of the voters and their elected representatives at the state house with her own.
Question 1 WILL NOT ratify or clarify authority past Massachusetts state auditors had, despite DiZoglio’s dishonest claims to the contrary. The Massachusetts state auditor does not now have and has never before had the authority to audit the state legislature without its consent.
Question 1 WILL NOT give the Massachusetts state auditor authority that many other state auditors around the country already have, despite DiZoglio’s dishonest claims to the contrary. No state auditor in America has (or ever had) the power Question 1 will give to the Massachusetts state auditor.
DiZoglio’s campaign for the passage of Question 1 has relied heavily on flatly untrue claims that have gone largely unrebutted because there is no organized opposition to Question 1. It is very telling that DiZoglio, despite a virtual guarantee of passage, has relied on lies about her office’s existing authority and about the measure’s constitutional defects. Clearly, she understands that Tuesday’s easy (if pyric) victory would have been much tougher if she were honest about the measure’s constitutional defects. The only visible and credible pushback on the legality of Question 1 has been from academics like me. A handful of political scientists and constitutional law professors have explained the statutory and constitutional absurdity of DiZoglio’s quest for the power to weaken the state legislature on the taxpayers’ dime. In response, DiZoglio simply dismisses the experts’ “bogus constitutional argument.” Of course, neither DiZoglio nor any of her surrogates have been able to point to even one single qualified expert willing to personally endorse the legality of Question 1. To my knowledge, none of the reporters with whom I have spoken about Question 1 have been able to find any qualified experts willing to endorse the legality of Question 1 either.
If you think it’s okay to ignore the experts when their counsel frustrates your political agenda, especially on issues about which there is virtual unanimity among the experts, then don’t bother scratching your head about the insanity of millions of Americans voting to re-elect a president who experts have already concluded was the worst president in American history. Just look in the mirror. If you are rationalizing your willful ignorance of Question 1’s defects by passing the buck to the Commonwealth’s Supreme Judicial Court, who will surely strike down any unconstitutional authority Question 1 confers on the auditor… at some point, you need to understand that playing constitutional hardball to advance a political agenda is not a harmless strategy (or even an effective one in this case). Openly questioning constitutional principles that every American should firmly understand before graduating from high school is a civics education nightmare that currently haunts American politics in Washington as well as many state capitols across the country. In the present “post-truth” environment of American politics, dishonest means cannot be condoned no matter how noble the intended ends.
Newspaper editorial boards, progressive activists, and media pundits who are willfully ignoring or actively obscuring the truck-sized constitutional hole in Question 1 are making a long-term mistake by allowing their justifiable frustration with the least transparent state legislature in America to compromise their integrity and credibility. Whatever moral high ground DiZoglio and her supporters had over Beacon Hill to date will be gone on Tuesday when their silence and/or open dishonesty leads to the passage of a blatantly unconstitutional state law.
By turning the state auditor’s office into a taxpayer-financed political advocacy operation Diana DiZoglio will severely damage the credibility of her office and set a dangerous precedent likely to be followed in the future by folks whose objectives are far less noble than hers.