IT COULD become the most important question in this year’s restructuring debate: Do you trust the voters, or don’t you?

Gov. Mark Sanford floated this line of argument in his State of the State address, when he told legislators he wasn’t asking them to let governors appoint most currently elected statewide officials but merely to give the voters the right to decide if they wanted to make that change. But it took Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell to turn it into a potent political argument that leaves defenders of the status quo stammering — or speechless.

Time after time at last week’s public hearing, constitutional officers and their supporters suggested that Sen. McConnell’s legislation — which calls for a constitutional referendum this fall on making the adjutant general, agriculture commissioner, comptroller general, education superintendent, lieutenant governor and secretary of state appointed positions — amounted to an attack on the notion that voters deserve a say in their government.

And time after time, Sen. McConnell patiently explained that his proposal gives voters an even greater say in their government — i.e., allowing them to decide not merely who holds office, but what kind of power those people have. On occasion, he innocently urged speakers to let him know if the legislation had somehow been drafted incorrectly, with a removal of voters’ rights inserted into it.

“If the public is to have a voice in the management style of their government, it’s all got to be put up to a vote,” Sen. McConnell said. “This does not take away anybody’s right to vote. It gives them the right to vote.”

When Agriculture Commissioner Charles Sharpe said it was “ironic” that our state proposes to “put all the power in the hands of one person” just as people around the world are standing up “to brutal oppression for the right to representation,” Sen. McConnell asked him directly: “Isn’t it empowering people to choose their management style?”

In the abstract, this isn’t a fair question. I didn’t buy it back in 2000 when legislators insisted that they didn’t actually support a lottery when they voted to put the question on the ballot — just the public’s right to vote on a lottery. That’s silly. You don’t ask voters whether they want to change the constitution unless you think the constitution should be changed.

That is, you don’t ask voters such questions if they approach representative democracy the way I approach it — supporting the republican ideals of the Founding Fathers, and rejecting the pandering populist notion of government by plebiscite.

The brilliance of the McConnell question is that it is being directed at people who do not approach representative democracy the way I do. It is being directed at people who believe that voters should decide practically everything — people who want to keep the executive branch divided into nine independent fiefdoms, with separate power bases for the directors of three agencies and an office whose duties are so ministerial that its holder has, correctly, been described as little more than a filing cabinet.

“What I don’t hear,” Sen. McConnell said more than once when the supporter of this elected official or that explained why that particular official must be elected, “is why we shouldn’t have a vote.”

Other senators echoed the theme. “The arguments are being made to us as if we are the jury,” Sen. Gerald Malloy said. “We’re determining whether to present these questions to the public. I’d like to hear more on whether the public should be able to vote.”

He didn’t get his wish.

Mr. Sharpe did try to answer the question. He said the people had already done this in 1982, when they voted to make the state’s long tradition of electing its agriculture commissioner a constitutional requirement.

Well, yes, Sen. McConnell responded. But does that lock them in forever?

He might have gotten a more interesting answer had he asked that of Assistant Adjutant General Mitchell Willoughby, who joined a phalanx of National Guard brass there to defend the system that gave them their state jobs. When asked why voters shouldn’t be allowed to say whether they actually wanted to elect the adjutant general, he responded: “I would say that the public did choose when they enacted the constitution a little over a hundred years ago.”

Actually, they didn’t. Our Constitution of 1895 was adopted by constitutional convention; it was never submitted to the voters. Perhaps one could argue that in calling for a constitutional convention, South Carolinians somehow signaled that they wanted to strip the governor of power by electing the adjutant general and a slew of other state officials. Or, to be more accurate, it might have indicated that those South Carolinians who were actually allowed to vote somehow chose this path.

But since women weren’t allowed to vote, and since the state’s white power structure had devised clever tricks to keep blacks and many poor whites from voting, it’s hard to draw any conclusions about what South Carolinians actually wanted in their government then — much less what they might want today.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.