Vote Issue Explodes Again in the Constituent Assembly

The majority vote vs. two-thirds vote debate in the national Constituent Assembly has exploded again. This is the same issue that led to a day of work and road shutdowns in four Bolivian departments a few months ago. Leaders of the Santa Cruz civic committee say they are already examining options for “resistance”. All this comes just three weeks before a dozen Latin American heads of state are expected for a summit here in Cochabamba starting December 8th.

The vote dispute has raged for months in the Assembly charged with drafting a rewrite of the country’s constitution. MAS, the political party of President Evo Morales, has a comfortable majority in the body elected last July, but not a 2/3 majority. Not coincidently, while MAS readily agrees that the final product of the Assembly should require 2/3 vote for approval, it believes that the votes on the various pieces along the way ought to be passable by a simple majority.

Opposition parties, led by Tuto Quiroga’s PODEMOS, are demanding a 2/3 vote for every piece of the new proposal as it is constructed. Also not coincidently, that would give the opposition an effective veto over MAS and its solid majority. It also avoids a political scenario they clearly don’t want – facing a fully drafted new Constitution months down the road full of things they don’t like. It would be much easier for the opposition to block its development piece by piece along the way than to try to stop the freight train of political momentum it might have behind it at the end of the process.

Negotiations have been ongoing to develop a compromise alternative, centered around proposals by the small third force in the Assembly, Samuel Doria Medina’s UN party, that the more controversial elements under debate require a 2/3 vote and the rest require a majority. UN party members, including Medina, the wealthy owner of Bolivia’s Burger King franchises, have been staging a hunger strike to draw public attention to their demands.

On Friday the Assembly approved, by a lopsided vote of 140 to 87, a resolution calling for a majority vote on everything. MAS critics charge that the vote – in which MAS members voted as a solid block – was orchestrated directly by President Morales and have declared that it is a sign of his intentions for authoritarian rule. MAS officials have criticized the opposition of being anti-democratic by trying to use a minority block to hold up the substantive work of the popularly elected Assembly.

What is democratic here and what isn’t? The debate reminds me of the old saying, “In politics, where you stand depends on where you sit.” I have little doubt that if PODEMOS and the UN were in the MAS position of a solid majority, but shy of 2/3, they would be solidly in favor of a simple majority vote. I also have little doubt that if MAS were in the opposition it would be screaming for a 2/3 vote.

The debate in governmental institutions over when “super majorities” should be required is not unique to Bolivia. In the California Legislature where I worked for years, there has been a debate for decades over whether the state budget should require 2/3 approval, as it does under the constitution, or whether it would be more “democratic” to let it be approved by a simple majority. The fact that Democrats favor a majority and Republicans 2/3 is strictly about who is in the majority (Democrats). The Republicans majorities in the US Congress have been famous the last two years about calling for an end to super majorities to cutoff filibusters and approve [Bush] judicial appointments.

To be sure, in Bolivia there is a reasonable debate to be had over principle on simple majority vs. 2/3 and I suspect that a handful of political scientists somewhere are eagerly engaged in that debate. But let’s not be foolish – the debate in Sucre is about power not principle and both sides are playing to work their advantage. That doesn’t mean that compromise isn’t a good thing on the issue – not so much for the sake of democratic principle but because Bolivia’s process of political transformation needs to keep moving forward without blowing up the country.