Category: term limits

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term limits

Voters with Zombie Power

Americans overwhelmingly support term limits for Congress. Nonetheless, last week, three-​fourths of the U.S. Senate said, “Hell no, [they] won’t go.”

By a 75 to 24 vote, Senators defeated an amendment introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint (R‑SC) to express support for a constitutional amendment limiting congressional tenure as a “sense of the Senate.”

Term limits killed again — but with zombies currently all the rage, could the issue reach back from the grave for revenge … hungry for incumbent flesh?

Yes.

Senate races in Indiana, Missouri and Montana feature incumbents in very tight re-​election contests who voted against the term limits the citizens of their states enthusiastically endorse.

Sen. Claire McCaskill’s campaign is reeling from scandal — her office billed taxpayers $76,000 for 89 chartered flights on a plane she co-​owned. If profiting from expensive jet-​setting on the taxpayers’ tab isn’t enough to defeat her, the Senator’s vote against term limits just might do the trick.

In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester claims to be a populist, but voted to allow incumbents to stay in office just as long as they live. What will Montana voters think about that … if they were to find out?

In a competitive GOP primary in Indiana between 36-​year incumbent Sen. Dick Lugar, the third longest-​serving senator, and State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, Lugar’s vote against term limits may be Exhibit A to show that he is an out-​of-​touch career politician — a part of the problem, not the solution.

Given a choice, voters favor candidates who favor term limits, who understand that power must come with limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Term Limits’ Mysterious Impact

Dr. David Valentine seems surprised by what he calls “The Unintended Consequences of Term Limits.” Valentine, a tenured expert on legislative matters, served as director of the Missouri Senate’s Division of Research from 1985 to 2001 and is now Associate Director for Public Service at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. According to his research, limiting the terms of Missouri legislators has led to — of all things — legislators serving less time in office.

Who’d have guessed?

“Over the course of ten years,” Valentine’s report found, “the average tenure for Missouri House Representatives dropped by almost two-​thirds, from a little over five years to two years.” The average tenure for a state senator dropped from nine years to three.

So, the good Doctor has diagnosed the legislature as less knowledgeable due to term limits: “Tenure can be viewed as a surrogate for knowledge,” Valentine explains, “about state government, the legislative process and the chamber in which members serve.”

In layman’s terms, representatives are serving less time, and thus they know less … about the legislature. No evidence or tests necessary; take it as a given.

But could some other knowledge be of import to legislating, to governing? Like the knowledge of running a business and how laws and regulations impact business? Or could teaching experience provide insight into education policy? Or working in health care or agriculture or … well, you get the point.

But Dr. Valentine doesn’t. He’s still overcoming his shock that limiting tenure produces less tenure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture incumbents term limits

Burial Rites

Libyan dictator Mu’ammer Gaddafi is dead. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez roams free.

Chavez recently returned to Venezuela from a cancer-​fighting tour of Cuba, proclaiming that “there is not a malignant cell in this body.”

  1. This is almost certainly not true, but
  2. let’s pretend it is, and just say that Hugo reserves his malignancy for his politics.

Usually, I’d contrast the lives of these two headmen with the more peaceful careers of term-​limited U.S. presidents. But if we stick to the news, to the very latest breaking stories, another contrast appears: The thousand-​year-​old Viking recently uncovered in Ardnamurchan, in the Scottish Highlands.

His burial was “high status,” we’re told. With him were his sword, his ax, his spear, and his shield. “He was somebody who had the capacity to do an awful lot of damage to people,” says one archaeologist.

In that way, the big-​shot Viking was like Gaddafi and Chavez. But we’ll never know what this particular Viking did, in the way of harm. Of Gaddafi’s and Chavez’s crimes, we know all too well.

Gaddafi won’t likely receive as respectful a post-​mortem treatment as the Viking received, at least if his “Weekend With Bernie” jaunt through Libyan streets is any indicator. It pays to die while still on top.

Which Chavez might be wise to ponder, instead of gloating about his cancer-​free cellular composition.

Dictators might not be term-​limited, but the ends of their careers tend to be pretty grim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people term limits

Corporate Domination?

While Californians celebrated the centennial of their initiative and referendum, the Associated Press pushed a story headlined, “Corporations, wealthy dominate initiative process.”

Reporter Judy Lin gave examples:

  • In 2010, Pacific Gas & Electric spent $46 million on a measure to make it more difficult for localities to go into the utility business — outspending the opposition by 161 to 1.
  • Another measure last year, to allow auto insurance discounts for continuous customers, was funded almost entirely by $14.6 million from Mercury Insurance.
  • In 2008, T. Boone Pickens’ company contributed over $22 million — outspending opponents 100-​to‑1 — on a measure to encourage use of natural gas … which would have benefited the billionaire’s business interests.
  • A 2006 ballot measure charging a severance tax on oil production to fund alternative energy programs was bankrolled with nearly $50 million dollars from real estate heir and Hollywood producer Steven Bing.

What Ms. Lin did not emphasize was that each of these big-​spending corporate/​rich-​dude campaigns had the same result: The voters defeated their ballot measure.

The millions spent didn’t sway the people.

If special interests “dominated” the state legislature (or Congress) in this same way, we’d be dancing in the streets.

I spent the 1990s organizing petition drives to put term limits measures before voters — over 100 state and local initiatives — and virtually every single one passed, usually by large margins. No one ever charged that the term limits movement was “dominating” the initiative process.

Nice to know that I’m not plausibly demonizable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Nebraska Initiative: Open or Closed?

In 2008, State Senator DiAnna Schimek’s 20-​year legislative career came to an end, thanks to the term limits initiative enacted by Nebraska voters. Third time proved the charm; the state supreme court had struck down the first two citizen-​initiated term-​limit measures.

Without the initiative process, no term limits. That’s reason enough for Schimek and other pseudo-​solons to despise the initiative — not to mention that every initiative breaks legislators’ law-​making monopoly

In 2008, Sen. Schimek and her fellow unicamereleons realized the voters had won. Unable to overturn term limits a third time, they did the next worst thing: wreck the path by which such popular reforms could be instituted in the future.

Schimek introduced Legislative Bill 39, which re-​wrote the rules for petitioning initiative measures onto the ballot. Illuminatingly, more than 90 percent of state senators termed-​out that year supported Schimek’s parting shot to punish the initiative petition process. When the governor vetoed this frontal assault on a fundamental democratic check, legislators overrode his veto. 

Since passage of LB 39 in 2008, not a single citizen initiative has qualified for the ballot.

Then, on Tuesday, after a multi-​year legal challenge brought by Citizens in Charge and Nebraska citizens, a federal judge struck down the law’s ban on out-​of state petition circulators as unconstitutional.

One of the chains left around the neck of the Nebraska citizenry by Schimek and that last batch of career politicians has now been removed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

How Not to Fix a Failed State

“As long as unions and business buy our politicians and take every advantage for themselves …” writes Ron Kaye at Fox and Hounds Daily, “California will keep declining.”

Mr. Kaye notes a rare agreement between business and union lobbies, which have united “to pour millions into a ballot measure next June to sell us on the idea that giving legislators 14 years in the house of their choice is better than making them serve eight years in the Senate and six in the Assembly.”

Kaye has the figure wrong: It’s twelve years in either body. Though billed as a tightened term limit, down from the 14 years now theoretically possible (by switching houses) to the proposed dozen, few politicians are able to manage such switches, so in actuality the limit would be weakened, from a tight six or eight to twelve.

This, Kaye argues, would make it easier for special interests to buy instead of rent politicians. The measure is “just another political charade.”

But I think Kaye errs by going on to say that today’s leadership failure “can’t be fixed by law.”

California suffers from a political infrastructure problem far worse than any other state: too small a ratio between politicians and citizens, insulating representatives in huge districts.

While no fix is guaranteed, the state could use more representatives, not fewer. 

And that’s a constitutional fix. Added to existing term limits, it might help nudge California government out of its current (and disastrous) rut.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.