Category: term limits

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term limits

The Revenge of the Mantra

“We have term limits; they’re called elections.” That’s the beloved mantra of term limits’ opponents.

For all their professed love of elections, though, these politicians don’t care much for the elections in which voters have enacted term limits. They regularly try any and every trick in the book to overturn such votes — anything to stay longer in office.

Take New York City. Voters passed term limits in one election; years later they smashed a term-limit weakening measure put on the ballot by the city council. But then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city council found a legal loophole, allowing themselves an extra term.

And they refused to permit the people any vote on their power grab.

But just weeks ago there was an election. Seventeen council members who had voted to weaken their own term limits faced primary opponents. Three were defeated. Two more are in races too close to call — with re-counts now underway. Another six won in very, very close contests.

The New York Times called the results “the greatest repudiation of incumbents in a generation.”

According to David Birdsell, dean of Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs, “Public frustration with what seems to be self-serving government officials is at a fever pitch right now.”

Call it “the revenge of the mantra”: Take away term limits, and voters will take away future terms the old-fashioned way . . . with elections.

This is . . . wonderful! This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Tupperware Really Locks You In

Plastics: yesterday’s future, today’s convenience.

Reading a report from Jefferson City, Missouri, I learned that I already knew something that the politicians in Missouri didn’t: The difference between polystyrene and polypropylene.

Polystyrene, when expanded, makes that wonderful white stuff we usually call “Styrofoam.” Polypropylene makes dishwasher-safe stuff like Tupperware.

Anyway, the solons of the great state of Missouri, concerned about floating debris from abandoned foam coolers on the state’s waterways, banned the wrong plastic. Instead of polystyrene, they banned polypropylene.

So now, slobs who leave their beer coolers out on the river still run free (along with responsible styrofoam users), while tidy folk who take Tupperware to the river could be nabbed and put in jail for a year.

It appears an innocent mistake. Lawmakers, trying to avoid brand names, wanted to get technical. They were just incompetent. Opponents of term limits might blame Missouri’s term-limited, less-than-exhaustively experienced reps. But everyone knows that this happens as much or more with the most calcified legislators.

Anyone could make the mistake, really. For the life of me, it’s simply a fluke that I remember the difference between the two poly-substances. Maybe it was because I once knew a girl named Polly.

In any case, the goofy law will not be enforced. It will almost certainly be amended in the next session.

And Missourians will remain free to pop and seal their Tupperware lids even at the river.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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local leaders term limits

“A” For Effort

They don’t make it easy for citizen initiatives in Alaska.

According to state law, legislatures there are prohibited from repealing a successful initiative for two years. Two whole years. Whoo hoo! And that’s it. After this two-year moratorium, lawmakers can haul out the shredder.

In 2007, voters in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula Borough passed a term limits measure that caps the tenure of the borough’s assembly members to two consecutive terms. The Alliance for Concerned Taxpayers gathered signatures to put the measure on the ballot.

For some strange reason, the Alliance doesn’t trust incumbent lawmakers in the borough to leave the term limits on themselves alone. They’re not the trusting type, I guess. But these term limits activists are not just wringing their hands and wailing, “Oh, I sure hope those incumbent lawmakers leave the term limits alone!”

Instead, two years after 2007, Alliance members have been out gathering signatures to put the same term limits measure back on the ballot.

Mike McBride, a spokesman for the group, says it’s easy as pie to get the signatures. “The public wants term limits, that’s the bottom line. . . . It’s a real popular idea.”

McBride says if the group has to go out and gather signatures every two years to keep term limits in place, they will. Good for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense term limits

Green Politicians and Ham

Dear Reader: This “BEST of Common Sense” comment originally aired on August 8, 2003. As a big fan of Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss — having read his books to my kids — this is one of my personal favorites. Amusing, too, that with all the hand-wringing by politicians over term limits, those actually living under the limits are showing relatively more favorable toward the limits. —PJ

“Do you like green eggs and ham? . . . Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say.”

Same goes for politicians and term limits. When state legislators ever-so-reluctantly try term limits, turns out that they actually like green eggs and ham, that is, term limits, better than state legislators who aren’t term-limited.

I read an endless stream of stories about how politicians, about to be term-limited, say the limits aren’t working. News flash: Politicians have always hated term limits. But now a survey commissioned by the National Conference of State Legislatures finds something surprising: there is more support for term limits among legislators in term-limited states than there is among politicians who have no actual experience with term limits.

Think about that. When asked whether term limits “promote healthy change” or “don’t work,” legislators serving under term limits in their state were 50 percent more likely to see term limits in positive terms than their unlimited colleagues.

“Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!”

Well, I guess we shouldn’t get carried away. Even in term-limited states, legislators oppose the limits by a margin of nearly four to one. Term limits were designed to please voters, not legislators.

Still, good to know that for legislators under term limits, the idea is starting to grow on them.

Ever so slowly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Niger’s Presidential Term Limits

Until recently, things had been looking up for Niger. Europe provides the nation with quite a bit of dough. Uranium is being mined there. Money money money.

Alas, that money perhaps explains President Mamadou Tandja’s dissolution of parliament several months ago. There had been no perceived threat. There was just the institution itself. And it did not want to go along with Tandja’s no-term-limit notion.

So then the 71-year-old leader trotted out his constitutional revisions to the people themselves, in a vote held in early August. But a huge segment of the voting population didn’t trust the man. After dissolving parliament, the stink of a power grab was upon him.

Many, many Niger voters boycotted the referendum.

With voter turnout way down, Tandja’s revisions won. But with a parliament suppressed, a boycott in play, and “ruler for life” on everybody’s lips, the whole thing smells bad. A whiff of it even caught the jaded noses of America’s news hounds.

In America, when leaders seek to escape term limits, media folks too often seem to support them. But, about Africa, anyway, even America’s most elitist media mavens realize that an end to term limits is a move to dictatorship.

Yes, at least regarding African politics, virtually everyone in the U.S. can see that term limits are essential to democracy.

Not much of a bright side, but there it is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Security Deposit for Term Limits?

Politicians do pay a price when they break a term limits pledge: No pledge breaker has ever been elected to higher office.

In 1992, Marty Meehan ran for Congress promising to serve four terms at most. In 1995, he rebuked congressmen for violating similar pledges, saying, “The best test of any politicians’ credibility on term limits, is whether they are willing to . . . limit their own service.” Meehan even filed a letter of resignation with the House clerk that supposedly would go into effect should he break his own word. But he did break it, finally leaving Congress only in 2007.

Meehan had always wanted to be governor. That was not to be.

Term limits have always been popular, and it’s embarrassing to be known for breaking a term limits pledge.

A new outfit called Alliance for Bonded Term Limits believes more than reputation should take a hit when politicians violate a term limits pledge. They think candidates should legally contract to pay up if they wimp out.

The plan, according to their website, is to “provide a vehicle for sincere candidates to demonstrate their commitment to limited tenure in office by voluntarily bonding their term limit promise with personal assets in advance of the election. These bonded assets of substantial worth will be forfeited to charity only if their promise is broken.”

Will it work? So far, the organization just has an idea. It’s a gleam in someone’s eye. But let’s keep our fingers crossed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Carson City Cakewalk?

It’s a heady time in Nevada. Next year’s election will be the first in which sitting legislators will be ousted under the state’s legislative term limits.

Politicians have begun to think hard about this. Quite a few lower-house reps have set their sights on the state Senate. Well, by “quite a few” I mean “nearly a dozen,” which is how David McGrath Schwartz of the Las Vegas Sun puts it. He also reports that “at least one senator forced out by term limits is seriously considering running for a seat in the Assembly.”

Is this news? Well, it was printed in a newspaper. But it’s hardly earth-shattering.

Yet, in that paper, it was made to seem earth-shattering. Schwartz led with this: “Nevada voters who passed term limits in the 1990s might have imagined it would bring a clean sweep of veteran politicians from office. What they’re likely to get will instead look more like musical chairs.”

Really? Musical chairs?

As analogies for elections in term-limited legislatures go, this falls a bit short. It implies that nearly all legislators will scramble for nearby seats. So far we have less than 13 out of 63.

And it forgets the voters. Who decide. When politicians “hear the music,” the music is played by voters.

Oh, and by the way: Switching chairs — competing for a new position — is one of the reasons for term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Banana Republic of New York

On June 8, New York state senate Republicans and two renegade Democrats acted to regain GOP control of the chamber.

Democrats tried various maneuvers to undo the coup. One was to lock the doors of the senate building.

Governor David Paterson bravely called the GOP’s re-ascendancy an “unnecessary distraction to government dressed up in the cloak, falsely, of reform.” One supposedly bogus reform would have imposed an eight-year term limit on committee chairman, a six-year term limit on leadership.

Anyway, then one of the Democrats who had jumped ship to the elephant caucus decided to canter back to the donkey side of the aisle. So now there’s a 31-to-31 split in the senate, with no lieutenant governor in place to break any deadlocks. Paterson used to be the lieutenant governor but became governor when the previous governor resigned in disgrace after scandalizing the republic across state lines.

So, now, whenever the lawmakers bother to show up for work, the Democrats hold their own legislative session independently of the independent legislative sessions of the Republicans. No quorums there. Believe it or not, all this is an improvement over how things are normally run in Albany.

Meanwhile, recent polls say two thirds of New York voters think the state is headed in the wrong direction. And 80 percent want term limits. Huh? How can this be?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption term limits

Seven Hundred Terms in a Row?

Ya gotta love Lou Lang. Any public servant who can manage to exude vast indifference to the public’s disgust with endless political corruption has something going for him.

As a state representative in Illinois, he has had a front-row seat to the constant corruption sordidly and melodramatically symbolized by former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s taped attempt to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

Like the disgraced governor, Lang favors brazen cynicism in the face of criticism.

After Blago got the boot, the new governor, Pat Quinn, set up an Illinois Reform Commission to study the corruption problem. The reform proposals ranged from the dubious to the . . . modest.

For example, the commission proposed term limits to combat political monopoly. But it proposed term limits not for all lawmakers, only for legislative leaders. And the cap? A rather generous 14 years.

Illinois voters won’t get even that, let alone a better deal, until they have the right of citizen initiative and can impose term limits themselves.

Yet even a 14-year maximum is way too stringent for the likes of Mr. Lang. After the commission issued its report, Lang rushed to assure the beleaguered populace of Illinois that if House members “want to elect Mike Madigan for 700 terms in a row, that’s our business.” Yeah! Get lost, citizens! Mind your own business!

Gotta love him.

Okay, maybe not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

The Pre-Coup Coup Attempt

It all seems so cut-and-dried. The United Nations, the Organization of American States, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, and Barack Obama — all as one demand that Manuel Zelaya be reinstated as president of Honduras. And they call his ouster illegal.

But there’s a history here. Like many heads of state, Zelaya hates presidential term limits, provided for in the Honduran constitution. To escape them, he sought a referendum to ask voters whether a constitutional convention should be called to replace the existing constitution. But he bypassed the country’s congress, which by law must approve any such referendum.

The Honduran high court ruled that the referendum would be illegal. Zelaya tried to proceed anyway. He even fired the chief of the armed forces for refusing to help carry out this illegal referendum. Impeachment of Zelaya was briefly considered, but then the court, in cooperation with the congress, ordered his ouster.

Now, I don’t assert Zelaya should have been deposed as he was. If the same procedures for dealing with power-grabbing rascals were prevalent in the U.S., the Watergate crisis would have been briefer, with Nixon quickly carted off to Canada.

But I do say that Zelaya’s own drastic coup attempt against his country’s constitution precipitated the response to it. Discussions of what happened to Zelaya should not omit or downplay the circumstances that led to his job loss.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.