Term Limits
If you know anything about term limits and political lifers, you know which one hates the other: Your typical politico disdains and reviles your typical term limit.
But it’s not just the typical term limit that politicians hate. It’s all term limits. In states with six-year or eight-year term limits, politicians often pretend to support the limits, saying they just want to tweak them . . . to get just a little more time.
But where state legislators do have more time, they don’t want to accept term limits either.
Take Nevada, where they are limited to a generous twelve-year stretch.
In Nevada, initiatives to amend the state constitution must be approved twice. Voters there passed twelve-year term limits on many officials, including lawmakers, in 1994 and again 1996. The amendment explicitly included the incumbents’ previous service. The law was retroactive. But the attorney general at the time opined that the law wasn’t retroactive, and incumbents got away with pretending it wasn’t.
That scam was bad enough. But now it’s 2008. And Nevada lawmakers and other incumbents are saying they should be allowed to run for re-election even if they’ve been in power for twelve straight years since 1996.
They’ve got some trumped-up technical excuse. But the bottom line is very familiar. They’re in power. They want to stay there. And to heck with the law . . . and the voters.
Sad, but true.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Experience counts.
For years I've been saying that a person can bring applicable experience to a new job, including a legislative job, and be effective right away. An accountant might get elected and still, as a freshman legislator, look at a state budget and say, "Uh, folks, the government is spending more than it takes in."
Maybe even a pilot or belly dancer could figure that out.
Incumbent lawmakers also say experience is important. But they'll add that the only way to get experience relevant to legislation is by accumulating years in a single seat of power. They explain that they can't learn the job until they've been around eight, ten, twenty years or so.
Such confession of incompetence might seem, to most people, more an argument for resigning than for being awarded permanent tenure. Or an argument for term limits. But the self-serving assertions of American incumbents now receive a powerful boost from overseas. From Cuba. From a son of the sainted communist soldier and mass murderer Che Guevera, head of the revolution.
Seems Camilo Guevera has endorsed Raul Castro's ascendancy to the presidency of Cuba. Fidel, dictator for decades, has been ill. Earlier this year his brother Raul, one of Fidel's most important flunkies for almost 50 years, took over. Camilo says "it would stupid not to take advantage of all that experience."
Hey, that's just what our "experienced" politicians say! Maybe we can send them to help Raul?
This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
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Even in his second term as South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford continues to flout the political establishment’s typical way of doing things.
A former congressmen who pledged to limit his tenure to three terms max, Sanford was one of a number of self-limiters in the Congress who showed that keeping one’s word does not amount to a political death sentence. You get the idea of his level of commitment from both the title and content of a book he wrote some years ago, The Trust Committed to Me.
Sanford’s fiscal conservatism is a tough sell wherever political incumbents just want to spend, spend, spend taxpayers’ money. So the governor doesn’t always use his political clout on behalf of incumbents who share his party affiliation but not his principles.
Sanford recently endorsed the candidacy of Ed Rumsey, who is challenging Bill Sandifer for a South Carolina House seat. This was the third time in recent weeks Sanford had endorsed a GOP challenger over a GOP incumbent. This angers Republicans who prioritize partisanship over sound policy.
Governor Sanford has a different idea. He and Sandifer are at odds over the issue of bloated spending. The governor wants to increase the chances that his vetoes will be upheld, instead of routinely overridden.
Sanford’s politics may stir up a ruckus, but, as he puts it, “seats don’t belong to individual members. It is not a franchise one gets to own.”
That’s common sense — and so’s this! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Here’s a story about a government board whose members endlessly dish out taxpayer money. And want endless years in power to keep doing so.
Recently, members of the Santa Clara water board approved steep salary hikes for two of their staffers, making them the highest-paid for their jobs in all of California. For example, the water district attorney will get an 8-percent hike so that she now pulls down $221,720 a year. Well, not exactly. She also got a $12,000 bonus. Then there’s her monthly car allowance: $750.
Yikes. Guess I’m in the wrong line of work.
Interestingly, the board doled out these huge hikes right after refusing to consider a proposal to let voters consider term-limiting board members. These antics are a strong argument for privatizing the water industry, frankly. Short of that, these guys definitely need to be term-limited.
It’s not exactly a secret in Santa Clara that the town’s water board is lavish with its budget. A spate of critical stories made the rounds of California papers after the board’s latest twirl of the financial spigot. As one reporter notes, the board has been “buffeted by charges of excessive spending.”
But you know, there’s buffeting and there’s buffeting. Trust me, any kind of buffeting that leaves incumbents in place to continue their exploitative fun and games is not enough buffeting.
Oh, forget “buffeting”! I’ll take term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Politicians often do everything they can to get out from under term limits — in Knox County, Tennessee, to the extreme. The politicians there simply ignored the limits, and went on with business as usual.
Then came a lawsuit. It went to the State Supreme Court, where the justices ruled, in effect, that of course the term limits law passed by the voters applies.
So, in January, the County Council held a meeting to replace its illegal members. That is when they showed their true colors.
Dan Barry, writing in the New York Times, charmingly describes the event: “Before an audience of hundreds, the commission staged a political version of a bedroom farce, with its members calling repeated recesses, retreating to a back room, shouting at one another and even swearing in one appointee during a break.”
The upshot? The old council filled 12 new spots, with likely suspects, including
- the son of one outgoing commissioner
- the wife of another
- the father of a sitting commissioner
- the sheriff’s top aide.
As Barry put it, “a catfish could have been appointed if properly connected.”
But this spectacle spurred a huge number of people who usually stay away from politics to get involved. A lot of new faces ran in the February primary, and persist for the coming August general election.
Yup: Term limits to the rescue.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Oklahoma State Senator Randy Brogdon is disappointed by the most recent objectionable conduct of his state’s attorney general.
The AG, Drew Edmondson, publicly opposes a bill to term-limit the offices of state officials, including his. The proposal would impose a twelve-year maximum. Mild as far as term limits go, but it still triggers all the alarm bells if you are part of a family dynasty of career politicians.
Senator Brogdon, a supporter of the bill, notes that Attorney General Edmondson typically declines to comment publicly on pending legislation. So it’s “very disappointing” to him that Edmondson is now ignoring that practice.
As for me, I can’t say I’m seriously “disappointed.” We’re disappointed by LAPSES in character, aren’t we? Not so much when persons with known character flaws — in this case, chronic contempt for democracy, the rule of law, the rights of the innocent — behave just as we expect.
Edmondson, after all, is currently trying to imprison me and two other honorable supporters of citizen initiative rights for our work on a 2005 initiative in Oklahoma. On fictional grounds. (See FreePaulJacob.com for details.) So it’s not like Edmonson has swerved from the straight and narrow. And I’m not exactly spitting up hot coffee.
Maybe I’m nitpicking. It’s always disappointing when power-grabbing incumbents act like power-grabbing incumbents. Would be nice if they changed their stripes. Most never will.
Which is why we need term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Is the fire gone?
Let me quote the first sentence of an article from South Dakota, the Argus Leader: “An effort to end term limits on state lawmakers in South Dakota fits with a trend nationwide that suggests the fire might have left the movement.”
Okay, so . . . there was passion, once, for term limits. The fire raged. Now the fire has perhaps sputtered out. Slipped out the back, Jack . . . maybe. Taken the 3:10 to Yuma . . . possibly.
It’s okay for a journalist to be uncertain of a conclusion — even a lead-sentence conclusion — if he can report at least some evidence for it. So what evidence was offered in the article?
The first bit, obviously, is this “effort to end term limits” in South Dakota. So, what’s the deal? Spontaneous uprising by the people? Naw, just the same old rearguard action by incumbent politicians and special-interest allies. There’s still widespread popular support in South Dakota for term limits. Nothing new on either count.
The reporter also says fewer states are enacting legislative term limits these days. True. But that’s got more to do with institutional blockages than any slump in popular support. In 26 states, voters have no power to pass statewide initiatives. And where they have it, politicians are trying to hobble that process.
Meanwhile, voters continue to support term limits whenever they can, and to rebuff efforts to scuttle them.
So the fire isn’t gone.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger no longer likes term limits. He explained why in an interview with the LA Times.
Says Arnold: “[O]riginally I felt very strongly that it was the greatest thing ever done. Because I despised the idea of guys being so locked in and safe in their positions, staying up in Sacramento and doing their deals and all this stuff.
“Now I’ve been there for four years and I say to myself, ’Oh my God, this is a disaster.’. . . It’s going to hurt the state, because we have to start all over again, getting acquainted with these new people coming in. . . . John Burton, whom I’d just gotten used to working with; he used to bring me delicious Austrian coffee and apfelstrudel. Now he’s gone.”
Gee, competitive elections are so inconvenient, aren’t they? With the people coming and going and all this stuff? Not to mention the strudel crisis.
U.S. Term Limits president Phil Blumel observed: “Yes, Arnold ’learned’ the lessons most politicians learn after a while in office: that government is the solution not the problem and that staying in office is better than leaving it.”
Blumel is right on. And I’m happy to report that California citizens ignored Arnold’s recent brainstorms and his endorsement of Prop 93, a devious term limits extension measure, defeated in February by Golden State voters. If the governor is still sad, well, maybe somebody can bring him some jelly doughnuts as a consolation prize.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I wish I coulda been there.
That was my reaction to reading about a recent Memphis, Tennessee, Charter Commission meeting. You see, term limits was the big issue.
There had been a lot of support in Memphis for limiting the terms of city politicians. And so the Charter Commission voted five-to-two to recommend the limits, and set it to a vote of the citizenry.
But one opponent broke down in tears. “Weeping and then sobbing,” according to the news report. This was after the commissioner in question charged that the issue of term limits was about nothing other than the current mayor, Willie Hernton. Oh, and “black leadership.” She charged that the whole issue was about race. And then wept more.
Another commissioner dropped his head to the table and said, in support the term limit vote, “I’ve been black longer than you because I’m older than you are.” And he then went on to say that the issue was irrelevant. They had a job to do, and letting citizens decide matters on term limits was part of their job.
What a meeting.
But surely it’s worth noting that term limits aren’t a tool for or against any particular race or constituency. They tend to open up seats for everyone. They are, in Biblical phrasing, “no respecter of persons,” merely limiting the time spent in office by any one politician.
It’s sad to hear of someone weeping over term limits. I’d prefer, well, smiles all around.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Is it possible to discuss the resignation of a dictator, like Fidel Castro, and not mention that he was, indeed, a dictator?
Apparently . . . as Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute noted on February 19, the day of the announcement. The newspaper stories that I read were carefully worded to exclude such a blunt term.
But we shouldn’t forget that Castro maintained power by rejecting democratic elections. And that practice gains for him the Longest Stay In Office Award.
Thutmose III may have ruled Egypt for four years longer, but hey: at least 20 years of that time he shared the throne with his false-beard wearing mother, Hatshepsut.
Why bring up Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaohs? Because Castro behaved more like a Pharaoh than a modern “El Presidente.” He did not merely preside over a democratically elected body — that’s where the term “president” comes from, “presider” — he also ruled the whole country without much sense of any limits.
The only term limit Fidel Castro honored was that of human frailty, I guess. To him, modern, limited-government rules like term limits made no sense. If you want to get something done, why let little things like legality and the liberties of citizens get in the way?
There are a lot of people with the same attitude. You hear it in the strangest places. Oddly, you read it in the newspapers, in their unwillingness to use a term like “dictator.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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We won. They lost.
I mean the February 5 defeat of Proposition 93 in California. Final tally: 46 percent Yes, 53 percent No. The end game of another huge effort by Golden State politicians, spending $17 million to trash term limits.
Most California voters like term limits, like how they rev electoral competition, stem corruption. So foes of term limits pretend to like them also. “They’re great,” they say. “Yippee for term limits! We just want to ’tweak’ them.”
A lie. They’d kill term limits altogether if they could.
Prop 93 would have boosted maximum tenure by 100 percent in the Assembly, 50 percent in the Senate. That was the point. Yet advocates said they wanted to cut term limits. Trim combined maximum legislative tenure, Assembly plus Senate, to twelve years, instead of 14.
Of course, lawmakers know that it’s lots easier to get re-elected as an incumbent than to win a new office in another chamber. For the vast majority, the new law would have meant a straight extension of tenure. And 14 years wasn’t even the real maximum either, given the measure’s generous transition period.
Last November in Maine, politicians brought a term limits extension to ballot — but admitted they actually wanted to lengthen their tenure. They also lost, of course.
California was a tougher battle. But it shows that even the most slick and brazen dirty tricks go only so far — when voters have a chance to hear the truth.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Pascal said that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
I’m thinking that the problem of politicians is that they cannot sit together without spending increasing amounts of money.
In his final State of the Union message, with Senators and Representatives gathered round, President Bush did what I’d hoped he’d do: Proclaiming he would issue an Executive Order to not spend the money directed by Congress’s earmarked pork spending.
But was that merely a sop to responsibility? The sum total of the rest of his suggested new spending netted out to nearly $135 billion. That is the most he’s ever proposed in a State of the Union address.
It’s still not half what Bill Clinton asked for in his final State of the Union speech, and Clinton didn’t have a wartime excuse. But do you see the pattern here?
The longer a president is in office, the more he wants to spend.
There’s something about sitting in a place of power that whispers to politicians one clear message: spend, spend, spend.
The longer in office, the more they obey that message.
Monks in monasteries talk about the need for spiritual discipline. Hmmm. What discipline might help politicians cope?
Well, the President serves under term limits. Increasing urges to spend get cut off at the end of the second term.
Too bad our Senators and Representatives don’t come up against a similar cutoff.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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