A mystery confounds the minds of North Dakota’s legislators.
It has a fake part and a real part.
The fake part itself has two parts: 1) how to learn whether voters support term limits, and 2) how to learn how a legislative body can function unless incumbents, whose advantages over challengers enable them to return to office sporting reelection rates exceeding 90 percent, may remain in place until ousted by death or scandal?
The answer to the first everyone knows. The answer to the second is to write down procedures and give tutorials and guidebooks on how the legislature works to newcomers in legislative halls.
The real mystery, though, is how to overthrow term limits given voters’ massive continuing support?
The answer?
This is where they get “clever”! Their plan appears to be: concoct the fake mystery and set up investigations premised on it.
And maybe sacrifice lambs and the first-born to the gods, hoping and praying and hoping some more that something turns up … anything to enable downtrodden entrenched legislators to cling to power for all eternity.
Regardless of popular support for term limits — support, after all, that has been confirmed in polls on the question conducted over the past four decades as well as in election after election.
This all explains why North Dakota legislators are paying $220,000 to Gary Consulting to find out how voters — who in 2022 passed term limits of eight years on the state house and eight years on the state senate — feel about term limits and how lawmakers feel about term limits.
I’ll tell you for free: voters love them; incumbents hate them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Go Ask Gary”
I expect that the study is intended to arrive at two conclusions. First, that what voters really want is not term limits, but something that they mistakenly believe will be effected by term limits. Second, that no good means can be found to get around the hopeless individual and institutional ignorance of legislating well that result from limiting representatives to a pitiable eight years in each chamber.
Then, armed with these predetermined conclusions, the would-be masters of North Dakota and their stooges will campaign for a nerfing of or end to term limits.
Every now-and-then, someone pops-up to argue that term-limits are constraints not simply on would-be officials but upon voters. So I will restate a couple of points from my ‘blog:
‘Opponents of term limits should not contrast the outcomes expected to obtain under term limits with those imagined to result under an idealized representative government. Ostensibly representative government is regularly not very representative; many participants in the political process — including individual voters — work actively to subvert the extent to which it is representative; and it can never be close to being perfectly representative. Illustrating the first of these points, note how often most voters feel compelled to select a least detestable candidate amongst a field of knaves and of fools, and note that major programmes opposed by a majority of voters are adopted by legislatures. Illustrating the second point, note people who vote in “open” primaries of the party they disfavor, hoping to effect selection of a weaker candidate for that party. To understand the third point, consider what would be required to select representatives whose preferences operationally mirrored those of the more general public.
‘Term limits change the incentive system for political officials and for would-be political officials. They can no longer make life-time careers in holding one office. If meaningful term-limits became the norm across all elected offices, it would no longer be practical for the typical elected official to make a life-time career of holding a series of elected offices. Those who held office would be less beholden to political machines and cartels, they would have less to sell, they would have to be proficient at more than office-seeking. More of them would be more representative than now, albeït still quite imperfectly so.’
How many of those who say they support term limits have routinely voted against an incumbent of their own party? Would voters who supported the eight year limit have used that principle to vote against someone they previously supported?
Note: when I clicked on today’s e‑mail link to the comment page it took me to Revolution Gen Z.
Pat, pretending that a desirable rule is in effect when it is not is often a way to lose the game.
With term-limits, one is not compelled to choose between an incumbent who has too long been in office and someone who seems still worse; the party of the incumbent will offer a new candidate.
And, when term-limits are universal across districts, one is not compelled to surrender relative power to some other district by rejecting an incumbent who has been in office too long.