Paul discusses how meaningful 1989’s Tiananmen protests were for him and for America, historically.
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Tiananmen & Term Limits
Category: term limits
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Beto’s Best Reform
“All too often politicians focus on their own re-election,” says Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, “at the expense of addressing the challenges our country faces.”
A supporter of term limits during his six years in Congress, in 2018 Beto left a safe House seat to challenge U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, also a term limits backer. In a very Republican state, Mr. O’Rourke fell just a smidgeon short of an upset, catching a ton of national attention — leading to his current candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
His “Plan to Realize the Full Potential of Our Democracy” calls for 12-year congressional limits and 18-year limits on U.S. Supreme Court justices. Admittedly, both require amending the Constitution, but a president using his bully pulpit sure can help the effort.*
“The issue of term limits in Congress has some bipartisan support,” notes a BuzzFeed News story, “but . . . it starkly divides Democrats.”
The reporter is not talking about voters — a poll last year found a whopping 77 percent of Democrats favor “Establishing limits on the number of terms members of the U.S. Congress can serve.”
But as the BuzzFeed article explains, “Former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and [Sen. Bernie] Sanders all oppose instituting them for members of Congress.”
Not surprising. Both Sanders and Warren are incumbents — with Sanders in Congress for the last 28 years and Warren in her second Senate term, while Biden spent 36 years in the Senate and eight more as Vice President.
“Limit permanent incumbency,” Beto’s website states, “to promote progress, reduce gridlock and inspire more to run for office.”
While Democrat politicians may not be pleased, O’Rourke’s term-limit push will register with voters of all parties.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob
* President Donald Trump endorsed term limits in the homestretch of the 2016 campaign. He would be wise to trumpet the issue again and again in order to keep pressure on Congress.
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What Tiananmen Inspired
Why did term limits spring up in the 1990s?
Term limitation has a long history in America, of course — and all the way back to Aristotle — but why the resurgence? I remember opponents suggesting that Americans were frustrated with slow economic growth.
Not likely.
In “Restoring Faith in Congress,” a 1993 article in the Yale Law & Policy Review, authors Kimberly Coursen, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein and Todd Quinn recognized that “the 1990s are different” because “the climate for far-reaching political reform is ripe.”
But why?
For seven weeks in 1989, Chinese students protested for freedom and greater democracy, joined by others until more than a million people filled Tiananmen Square. Americans were deeply moved by their makeshift Goddess of Democracy, resembling our Statute of Liberty, as well as by the students’ demands, which read much like our Declaration of Independence.
Then, all that hope was doused, courtesy the Butchers of Beijing.
Five months later, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the overthrow of communism throughout Europe, then the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
No more Cold War.
Americans, lacking an external enemy for the first time in decades, and with Tiananmen’s “tankman” fresh in our minds, could at last safely take a good look at our own government.
We did not like what we saw.
In 1990, Americans in three states — California, Colorado and Oklahoma — used direct democracy by petitioning term-limit initiatives onto the ballot. All three won. In 1992, U.S. Term Limits rallied voters to pass initiatives in a record 14 states.
Sadly, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests did not usher in freedom for China. Yet, they lit fires in hearts across the globe.
Including mine.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Over the weekend, I suffered through Knock Down the House . . . so you don’t have to.
While the documentary heralding four inexperienced Democratic women running for Congress in 2018 cost Netflix $10 million, I did not have to spend a dime — beyond my regular monthly subscription.
The award-winning film, directed by Rachel Lears, who wrote it along with her husband, Robin Blotnick, is expertly crafted. Unfortunately, it is geared to democratic socialists predisposed to adoring the subjects.
The star is now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who defeated then Rep. Joe Crowley, a ten-term, 20-year incumbent . . . the Number 4 Democrat in the House of Representatives.
In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, the movie follows Amy Vilela, seeking to replace a retiring Nevada Democrat; Cori Bush, challenging the Clay Family’s hereditary congressional dynasty in Missouri’s 1st district*; and Paula Jean Swearengin, battling incumbent Sen. Joe Machin in West Virginia’s Democratic Party Primary. Of the four challengers chronicled, all of whom received extensive support from two progressive groups, Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, AOC was the only winner.
“Let’s assume all the energy in this room can get you on the ballot and into office,” offers a fellow at one of Ocasio-Cortez’s early meetings. “How, then, do we overcome the drop in power?”
“I think we really need to have to look at what that power does now,” AOC responds. “When it matters, [Rep. Crowley] doesn’t stand up for us; when it matters, he doesn’t advocate for our interests.”
Whatever one thinks of AOC’s politics, her point here is not without merit: the idea that we citizens benefit from longtime incumbents who ‘bring home the bacon’ is . . . baloney.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* At the completion of this term, Rep. Lacy Clay, Ms. Bush’s opponent, will have served 20 years. His father, Bill Clay, held the seat for 32 years before that. Together, over half a century. The film alludes to the fact that Clay Jr. gained the seat in 2000 only after the surprise retirement of Clay Sr. on the very last day to file for the office . . . with Jr. filing, instead.
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“The Democratic Party leadership is choosing machine politics,” charged Alexandra Rojas, the young executive director of Justice Democrats, “over ushering in a new generation of leaders and the fundamental idea of democracy.”
She specifically assails the DCCC’s blacklist of political professionals working for Democratic Party candidates who dare to challenge Democratic incumbents in next year’s Democratic primaries.
The Intercept reports that “at least four consultants dropped” challenger Marie Newman’s campaign “under pressure from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s new policy to cut off vendors working with primary challengers.”
Newman is formidable, having come within 2 percentage points of Rep. Dan Lipinski in the 2018 Illinois Democratic Primary. The National Abortion Rights Action League, Democracy for America and other progressive groups are decrying a DCCC “blacklist policy that protects anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, corporate Democrats like Dan Lipinski.”
And progressives have reason for disgust. Lipinski is a protected insider.
For the last 36 years, there has been a Lipinski in Congress. Bill Lipinski, the current congressman’s father, held the seat for 22 years before giving it to his son. And yes, “giving” is correct.
In 2004, two months before the November election, while running unopposed for a 12th term, the incumbent resigned — too late to trigger a special election wherein voters could make a choice. Instead, Bill’s replacement was hand-picked by the Illinois district’s Democratic Party Committee.
Controlled by — you guessed it! — Bill Lipinski.
That insider group chose Bill’s son, Daniel, who was then living in Kentucky.
“It was an open process,” claimed the father.
Today, per the blacklist, “[t]he DCCC says the policy doesn’t discourage primary challengers.”
Well, I guess no one expects truth from a political machine.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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My Kind of Mayor?
Chicago, the nation’s fabled “second city” — though, now the third largest incorporated metropolis in these United States — sports a new mayor. On Tuesday, Lori Lightfoot won the city’s mayoral runoff by a whopping 47 points, tallying 73 percent of the vote.
As reported, she is a mayor of many firsts. While Chicago has previously elected two African-American men to be mayor as well as one female,* Lightfoot becomes the first female African-American mayor.
Additionally, Lightfoot is the first openly gay Chicago mayor.
And not to put too fine a point on it, she is also without a doubt the first openly gay, African-American female mayor of Chicago named Lori. Or named Lightfoot, for that matter.
But there’s more!
I’m here to tell you that Ms. Lightfoot has captured yet another, far more consequential first. Something not dictated for her by birth — such as skin color, gender or sexual orientation — but chosen in her individual decision-making process.
Lightfoot advocates reform and — unlike any other Chi-town mayor in history, from before the fire to now — she means limits on her own terms in office.
In fact, her campaign’s position paper on “Cleaning Up City Government” puts it first: Impose a Two-Term Limit on the Mayor.
“Chicago is the largest city in the country without mayoral term limits,” she notes, which “has led to entrenched leaders, a lack of new ideas and creative thinking and city government that works for the few, not the many.
“This will change when I am mayor,” she pledges, “and introduce an ordinance that brings Chicago into the mainstream by limiting mayors to serving two terms.”
Let’s do it. And why not limit the terms of city aldermen, too?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In 1979, Jane Byrne became not only the first woman elected mayor of Chicago, but also the first woman elected to head any major U.S. city
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