Put the War on the Ballot

The two local groups who want to place an anti-war resolution on the City's November ballot have taken their case to court. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts will now have to decide whether Cambridge City Solicitor Andrew T. Trodden was correct last week in ruling against the inclusion of the resolution on the ballot. Trodden said the resolution was "not within the sphere of action of the City of Cambridge."

The case for the resolution (for legal purposes the suits brought by the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on Vietnam and the Vote on Vietnam Committee have been combined) depends on a straightforward reading of the General Laws of Massachusetts.

According to Section 37, an initiative petition is a document signed by at least eight per cent of the registered voters that requests the City Council to pass a "measure." A measure, in form, is defined as "an ordinance, resolution, order or vote." The test of legislatibility, whether the Council can act on the proposal, is not mentioned.

Proponents of the petitions also point out, and correctly, that the City Council twice last May passed a resolution in support of the war. If Trodden says the city is impotent to deal in foreign affairs, they argue, why is the City Council permitted to vote such resolutions?

Thus far the City's most intelligent reply has been to cite the 45-year-old case of Dooling vs. City Council of Fitchburg. The case dealt directly with the possible uses of initiative petitions. The Supreme Julicial Court ruled "It cannot have been the purpose of the General Court to require or to permit the referendum or the initiative... touching subjects wholly outside the field of authorized action by the City Council. Such a futile intention cannot be imputed to the General Court."

But the Dooling decision can be assaulted, with a good chance of success, in two ways. The Court contends that unless the applicability of the initiative is limited, the city will be flooded with expensive and trivial referenda. Surely, though, it is expensive to collect names and have correct papers drawn. Presumably it takes more than a burst of pique to goad anyone into organizing a referendum.

Second, and more important, the Dooling case was explicitly concerned with the distribution of power between a mayor and city council. When the judges spoke of subjects "outside" the "field of authorized action" of the city council, they meant issues reserved for the mayor's attention.

Clearly the initiative must not be used to introduce popular control willy-nilly over every branch of government. But the Vietnam resolution is no attempt to do this; it does not threaten the activities of any Cambridge body. Rather, the resolution is a reasonable attempt to do precisely what the City Council has clearly done clumsily: portray publicly the opinions of the citizens of Cambridge on the war in Vietnam.