Washington Post: The voters approved it. Should lawmakers erase the result? In D.C., a debate about democracy.

At an Irish pub on H Street NE, a room full of restaurant workers and owners lobbied Charles Allen.

They wanted the D.C. Council member to support a repeal of Initiative 77, a ballot measure voters approved in June that ­raises the minimum wage for servers, bartenders and others who earn tips. …

There has long been tension between lawmakers and the initiative process, but the latest backlash is fierce, said Elena Nunez, director of state operations and ballot measure strategies at Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog group.

The rollback effort is a two-pronged offensive, she said. First, legislatures undo the laws passed through ballot initiatives and then make it more difficult for voters to pass future initiatives.

“Legislatures have become much more brazen in trying to undo what the constituents put in place,” Nunez said. “It has become a more heightened attack. That’s a troubling trend.”

Some on the left say Republicans, after taking control of statehouses across the country in 2010, stepped up the attack on initiatives, which became the last way for progressives to pass laws in those states. Recently, conservative legislatures have challenged criminal-justice reforms and health-care expansions.

But if Democrats were in office, they would also try to block initiatives they oppose, Altic said.

The ballot-initiative process itself is not intrinsically partisan — it is a tool both parties wield.

And it has been used since the Progressive Era of the 1890s to the 1920s, when the modern ­citizen-driven ballot initiative took root. Populists and progressives of the time advocated for direct democracy as a check on lawmakers they felt were too beholden to special interests, such as the railroad industry in California, that flourished during the Gilded Age.

“Ballot measures are a way for voters to take action when their elected leaders won’t,” Nunez said.