Category: term limits

United We Term-Limit

Most Americans appreciate the truth of Lord Acton’s venerable dictum: “Power tends to corrupt and absolutely un-term-limited power corrupts absolutely.”

I’ve slightly reworded it.

Sorry, Baron.

Anyway, instead of presuming, said John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, that powerful men “like Pope and King” can do no wrong, we should presume the opposite. The more power a person can freely exercise, the more likely he will abuse it. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

Americans tend to agree. So we see the wisdom of regularly depriving incumbents of power that increases the longer they are in office, even as they become more inclined to abuse this power.

Most incumbents hate term limits. Yet we’ve also seen strong bipartisan support for the reform from many eminent politicians — for example, U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, Republican, and former Governor Ed Rendell, Democrat, both of Pennsylvania.

“Entrenched politicians have been steering the ship of state for decades and . . . we’re about to hit a $25 trillion national debt iceberg. It’s time for a new approach,” they say in a recent op-ed. “Our elected representatives seem afraid to do anything that would jeopardize their reelection. Term limits allow them to operate without that pressure, secure in the knowledge that they are not risking the position that could be a lifetime career.”

The two experienced elected officials, Rendell retired and Toomey retiring in 2022, also support a convention of states as the most practical constitutional method of term-limiting Congress.

Americans are coming together, right now, over term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo of Governor Ed Rendell by Center for American Progress

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Lifetime Politicians Ruin Christmas

Post author By Editor
Post date September 14, 2020
3 Comments on Lifetime Politicians Ruin Christmas

Legislators, anxious to further weaken their own term limits, placed Issue 2 on the Arkansas ballot.

The current limit is already a loiteringly long 16 years — thanks to a dishonestly worded, legislatively referred 2014 ballot amendment, which weakened the voter-initiated limits.*

Voters came back in 2018 to restore the original six-year House and eight-year Senate limits, placing a measure on the ballot that from various public reports received nearly 80 percent of the vote. But an Arkansas supreme court decision forbade counting those votes.

Still, politicians are back with another term limits attack. Issue 2 lowers the 16-year limit to 12 years. Huh, lowers? Stay with me. Issue 2 grandfathers everyone elected this year or before. Current office holders get the full 16 years — plus no lifetime limit (that gets nixed), allowing politicians to return for another 12 years after a short break.

No wonder the citizens’ group Arkansas Term Limits opposes Issue 2, calling it “The Lifetime Politician Amendment.”

Not unrelated, there is also Issue 3. Arkansas legislators have repeatedly attacked term limits and the only way for citizens to get a real term-limit on the ballot: the citizen petition process.

“Advocates acknowledged the amendment, [Issue 3], would make it harder to qualify proposals for the ballot,” the Arkansas Times’ Max Brantley explained, “but generally saw that as a good thing.”

One poison-pill provision would slice six months from the petition process, moving the deadline from warm, sunny July to cold, dark January — and forcing campaigns to flood Christmas shopping with petitioners trying to gather signatures.

Call it “The Ruin Christmas Amendment.”

Putting 2 and 3 together: The Lifetime Politicians Ruin Christmas Amendments.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Want to holler at that politician author who hoodwinked voters? Go to a federal prison … where Senator Woods relocated after convictionson political corruption.

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initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

The Limits of Corruption

Republican Speaker, Larry Householder, bribery

Another corrupt, term-limits-hating, careerist politician bites the dust.

“Federal prosecutors say Republican Speaker Larry Householder and four others — including a former state GOP chairman — perpetrated a $60 million federal bribery scheme,” reports the Dayton Daily News, “connected to a taxpayer-funded bailout of Ohio’s two nuclear power plants.”

Last year, a citizen-initiated referendum campaign sought to give voters the final say on the legislature’s $1.5 billion baby. “The relentless machinations of HB 6’s backers,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes points out, “kept [that] repeal effort launched against the bill off Ohio’s ballot.”

At a news conference to explain the arrest of Householder and his co-conspirators on racketeering charges, federal prosecutors detailed some of the ways the scheme illegally blocked last year’s referendum effort.

Now, the rush is on to repeal House Bill 6.

Mr. Suddes is correct that “[t]he legislature also won’t be OK till voters amend the Ohio Constitution to make it easier to place issues on the statewide ballot for up-or-down votes.”

But when he goes on to argue that term limits are “part of that problem”?

The only thing Ohio’s term limits need is to make the limits lifetime — forbidding legislators from returning after a timeout. Householder had previously been speaker from 2001 to 2004. “While he officially left office due to term limits,” informs the Plain-Dealer, “he departed Columbus amid an FBI investigation that closed without charges.”

Householder also came to our attention back in March, when he called Ohio’s eight-year limits “pretty oppressive.” Before the pandemic, he was pushing a ballot measure designed to weaken the term limits law and serve until 2036 — foreshadowing what Putin* did later in Russia.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I referred to them as “two pols in a pod,” but now, Householder reminds me more of former Arkansas State Sen. Jon Woods, who after sponsoring a deceptive ballot measure to weaken term limits was convicted on multiple felony charges and is serving his current term in prison.

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initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs term limits

He Tries Harder

He’s the Avis Rent A Car of authoritarianism.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is not the most evil tyrant on the planet. That title clearly belongs to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Instead, Putin is No. 2.

So, of course, he tries harder.

Two years ago, Xi Jinping got the Chinese Communist Party to jettison his term limits without breaking a sweat. Not the slightest pretense of democracy necessary.

Two weeks ago, Putin finally caught up with Xi by winning an unnecessary and highly fraudulent national referendum designed to legitimize the constitutional jiggering that would allow him to stay in office until he would be 83 years old.

Beating Joseph Stalin for post-tsar star tsar.

So, how did Putin rig the referendum?

“Voters are being asked to approve a package of 206 constitutional amendments with a single yes-or-no answer,” explained National Public Radio. Many U.S. states have single-subject requirements for ballot measures to prevent precisely this sort of log-rolling.

Sergey Shpilkin, a well-known Russian physicist, produced statistical evidence that “as many as 22 million votes — roughly 1 in 4 — may have been cast fraudulently,” ABC News reported.

“The European Union regrets that, in the run up to this vote, campaigning both for and against was not allowed,” read a statement from the 27-nation block. With little debate and scant information, the referendum was just pretense.

So, why did Putin go through all the trouble to pretend?

Low approval ratings, a New York Times piece argued, his “lowest level since he first took power 20 years ago.” Putin needed all the help that fake democracy can provide.

Without any of those uncomfortable checks-on-power that real democracy demands.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political challengers term limits

Coburn’s Terms

Over the weekend, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Kent.) was single-handedly battling the entire Congress, another fighter with the inner courage to stand up against the Washington mob was sadly losing his battle with cancer. On Saturday, Dr. Tom Coburn passed away at age 72.

Honored in his day with the sobriquet “Dr. No,” Coburn the obstetrician had delivered 4,000 babies; Coburn the congressman had “frustrated Democrats and Republicans alike,” The New York Times explained, “with his propensity for blocking bills.”

When Coburn successfully blocked $150,000,000 in proposed new government spending, the Washington Post derisively called it “chicken feed.” In this space, we used this term: priceless.

“His contempt for [career politicians] is genuine, bipartisan and in many cases mutual,” noted The Times, adding that Coburn “once prescribed a ‘spinal transplant’ for 70 percent of the Senate.”

Dr. Coburn challenged the House rule prohibiting him from continuing to practice medicine while in office. “They’re really killing any idea for representation outside the clique of good old boys,” he argued. “It suggests people can’t believe in term limits and serve in Congress.”

He won.

Tom Coburn pledged to serve no more than three House terms and kept his word. Four years later, he ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat, likewise pledging a two-term self-limit* — becoming “The Conscience of the Senate.”

“One of the reasons I’ve been such a pain in the neck up [in Washington],” offered Coburn, “is because I knew I was leaving.”

Dr. Tom Coburn was one of us — a representative, and not a politician. He will long be remembered by those who love our Republic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “I believe more than ever,” Coburn said in keeping his self-imposed three-term House limit, “that our nation’s problems have been created because career politicians have set themselves apart as an elite class of people trying to dictate to us how we run our lives.”

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term limits

Putin (and Householder) for Life

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 13, 2020
No Comments on Putin (and Householder) for Life

For the last 20 years, Vladimir V. Putin has served (himself) as either Russian president or prime minister, switching offices to get around the nation’s term limits.

“In the past, Mr. Putin proceeded cautiously, seeking to preserve a veneer of legitimacy,” explains The New York Times. “Confronting term limits in 2008, Mr. Putin opted for a four-year hiatus as prime minister while his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, became the caretaker president.”

Required to step down in 2024, at the close of his second consecutive six-year term, Putin is not leaving.

Legislation proposed and passed this week by the Duma, if approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court and by voters in an April plebiscite, would re-start the autocrat’s term limits clock, allowing the 67-year-old to stay in power until 2036 … to the ripe old age of 83.

Putin told the Duma that someday “presidential authority in Russia will not be, as they say, so personified — not so bound up in a single person,” but that day is clearly not at hand.

“If he serves until then,” the Times informs, “Mr. Putin will have held the nation’s highest office for 32 years, longer than Stalin but still short of Peter the Great, who reigned for 43 years.”

The Times also notes that “Mr. Putin joined President Xi Jinping of China and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, authoritarian leaders who have extended their rule.”

Not mentioned? Ohio’s Republican House Speaker Larry Householder,* who calls his state’s voter-enacted term limits “pretty oppressive,” and is pushing an initiative amendment for this November’s ballot that will do in Ohio precisely what is being done in Russia: ignore all previous years in office, allowing Householder to hold power through 2036.

Just like Putin. Two pols in a pod.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Mr. Householder’s GOP credentials are somewhat questionable. A recent headline asks, “Will the Marriage Last Between Larry Householder and Democrats?”

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