A politician has changed his mind about term limits.
Over the years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has often expressed firm support for the city’s two-term limit on officials. But lately his comments about term limits have been getting fuzzier.
And now the newspapers report that the mayor openly supports a unilateral revision by the city council to weaken the limits from two terms to three.
The change would have to be unilateral. Bloomberg is a popular mayor, but his own polling shows that most New Yorkers, although they may like him, would dislike any weakening of the term limits law.
New Yorkers passed the two-term limit in 1993. They confirmed their support in 1996. Bloomberg and city councilors will be showing an extraordinary contempt for the voters if they dictatorially trash term limits to cling to power.
The bad news gets worse, alas.
Ronald Lauder, the billionaire who financed the term-limits drive in 1993, now says he supports a third term for Bloomberg, and supports bypassing voters.
Lauder contends that in these trying financial times, it is just too risky to let anyone else man the helm. Funny, though, how the city managed to carry on in the wake of 9/11, letting Mayor Giuliani step down. That was a worse mess.
But then, the mess may be in the eye of the incumbent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “A Bloombergian, Buzzing Confusion”
What a bum!
Just another example of politicians not caring about their constituants. Politics as usual. If the people don’t like what us politicians are doing, screw them, we’ll make up the rules we need to do it anyway.
yep… great, who needs rules any way?
certainly not our “elected” leaders.
we’re just another step closer to the new world order…
I was wondering why we have so much extra toilet paper, then I realized, every one is using the Constitution.… thanks Illuminati I feel safe knowing me and my children will be forever your unwilling slaves,and only know what you want us to.
I’m generally against career politicians, but there are two arguments one can make against term limits: (1) bureaucrats are not term limited, hence term limits transfer institutional memory (and a corresponding chunk of power) from elected officials to unelected bureaucrats; (2) not all politicians are bad; what happens when voters really do want to keep one of them beyond the term limit?
One possible solution is to require ever greater majorities to be re-elected. For example, 50% of the vote gets you in for the first term; to get re-elected to a second term, you need 55%; a third term requires 60%; etc. Such a system balances the power of incumbency with a correspondingly greater hurdle.
Well, Bloomberg is a huge nerd but he’s not the worst mayor the city has had, at least…