On Wednesday, the Senate took up a resolve that would have asked voters to amend the Maine Constitution to prohibit citizen initiatives on hunting and fishing regulations.

It failed to garner the necessary two-thirds vote to pass.

On Thursday the House took up the same resolve, which also failed.

While we understand the intent of this resolve was to protect Maine’s hunting and fishing heritage from “outsiders” who may influence our gaming laws — bear baiting being the most immediate worry of the bill’s supporters — we must not carve out special bans on citizen initiatives.

The initiative process in Maine is vibrant because it gives voice to the people when the people feel their representatives aren’t listening to them.

It’s our chance to pass legislation directly, or to repeal laws that we object to.

In simple terms, the process gives power to the people. A power that not every state allows, so we must hold tight to this right to redress our grievances.

According to state records, since 1910 citizens initiated 60 questions, the results of which gave us term limits in 1993, allowed our stores to open on Sundays starting in 1990, enacted Clean Elections in 1996, adopted the use of medical marijuana in 1999, and rejected a measure to allow physician-assisted suicide in 2000.

In 2002 we voted to allow Maine to issue short-term debt in limited amounts that must be repaid with federal transportation funds within a year. We did this to help fund important development of highways, bridges and other transportation projects that went unfunded through the legislative process.

In 1995, we rejected a referendum question that would have forever limited protected classifications in state law to “race, color, sex, physical or mental disability, religion, age, ancestry, national origin, familial status and marital status.” In 2005, voters added the protected class of sexual orientation to the Maine Human Rights Act.

In 1911, we adopted a process of nomination of political candidates by primary elections after the Legislature failed to do so.

In 1927, voters rejected a question to reverse the 1911 vote and primaries live on.

In 1923, voters rejected a referendum that would have established a 48-hour workweek for women and minors, which was 15 years before the Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted to protect workers.

In 1971, we rejected a referendum that would have abolished Maine’s income tax laws, and six years later we passed a citizens’ measure to repeal the Uniform State Property Tax.

Most of the citizen initiatives over the years have been centered on the question of taxes — personal, property and corporate — like opposing a move in 1933 to raise the taxes on electric companies.

But, citizens have never been afraid of initiating issue questions, including a failed prohibition for anyone to generate electricity by “means of nuclear fission” in 1980.

In 1983, voters considered a hunting question: An Act to Repeal the Law Providing an Open Season on Moose. It failed, and the season remains limited.

And, in 2004 we rejected a measure that would have made hunting bears with bait, traps or dogs a crime, and those forms of hunting continue.

And remember this one from 2004?

Some 99,763 of us voted on a warm June day to require the state to pay 55 percent of the cost of public education, including special education, “for the purpose of shifting costs from the property tax to state resources.”

That voter mandate is an obligation the Legislature has never fulfilled.

We tried twice to enact term limits on Maine’s congressional representatives, but those efforts were found to be unconstitutional.

And, then, there have been multiple casino questions, one of which passed for the Oxford Casino in 2010.

There were so many referendum questions during governor-turned-senator Angus King’s terms in office that as he was ending his second term he questioned whether it was too easy for citizens to amend the Constitution through the citizen’s initiative process.

If anyone agreed with him, no one sought to end the practice. In fact, the process was defended as a basic citizen right.

So far this year there is only one citizen initiative filed with the Secretary of State’s Office. It is proposed by Stavros Mendros of Lewiston and was filed last month. The question asks Mainers whether we want to create mandatory minimum sentences for persons convicted of certain sex offenses against victims under the age of 12 years.

Given Mendros’ petition prowess, we can be sure he’ll gather the needed signatures and voters will consider that question in November.

Which brings us back to this week’s failed resolve, a bill written solely to tinker with the initiative process and carve out two specific categories that would be exempt from direct citizen input.

The argument in favor of the prohibition regarding hunting and fishing was to quell special interests from interfering in the referendum process.

Why just hunting and fishing?

An argument could well be made that any initiative can be influenced by outside money and other special interests, but the solution is not to outlaw citizen input. The solution is quite the opposite: let’s talk about the issues that are important to Maine people in an open debate and then decide for ourselves.

Citizen initiatives are the purest form of self-governance. Let’s honor the power we have to create our own political change.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.