Voters saw right through the tactic, however, and Prop. 22, which designated ride-hailing drivers as independent contractors, won easily. The final tally was 58% to 42%. Voters also had the opportunity to roll back Prop. 13, a constitutional amendment that capped commercial property taxes at 1% of the purchase price and restricted rate increases to, at most, 2% per year. Prop. 15 was proposed as a replacement, which would’ve linked commercial property taxes instead to the market value, not the assessed one. The result would’ve been a massive, billion- dollar tax hike on businesses, both large and small, in an already-overtaxed environment. Prop.15, however, failed, 48% to 52%. And how about the ballot initiative to “expand rent control by local governments,” which crashed and burned by a whopping 20 percentage points? Is the cudgel of class warfare becoming too hackneyed even for... California? Moving up the I-5 corridor to Oregon... where voters had a chance to rein in Portland’s out-of- control homeless problem by taking an honest look at the drug epidemic behind so much of it. Yet what did voters decide? To decriminalize hard drugs, of course! Voters in the Beaver State passed Measure 110 by a 17-point margin, which legalizes personal possession of cocaine, heroin, oxycodone, and meth. They also passed Measure 109, making Oregon the first state in the nation to legalize hallucinogenic drugs as a means to foster “personal development” and combat depression.
It’s unclear how “magic mushrooms” will help stabilize a person’s mental health or how normalizing meth on the streets will ameliorate the state’s public health and safety crises, but hey, federalism baby! Let Oregon experiment with this anti-social behavior so the rest of the country doesn’t have to. It’s unclear how “magic mushrooms” will help stabilize a person’s mental health or how normalizing meth on the streets will ameliorate the state’s public health and safety crises, but hey, federalism baby! Heading over to Big Sky Country, gun- control zealots decided it was a worthy pursuit to dump piles of money in, out of all places, Montana. The Michael Bloomberg- financed Every Town for Gun Safety, along with similar groups, spent $1.4 million in an effort to convince residents there to give up their Second Amendment rights. That attempt failed. While gun rights advocates barely spent $50,000 to make their case, Legislative Referendum 130 still passed. From now on, Montana’s local authorities do not have the power to regulate the carrying of concealed firearms. That power is left up to the state. Residents don’t need to worry that one municipality’s ordinance on guns is different from another’s. The law will be uniform. Supporters hailed this victory in a very Montana way: by quoting the video- game gunslinger, Duke Nukem. “It’s time to
American Consequences
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