Today is Term Limits Day. Why celebrate:
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Happy Term Limits Day!
Saturday is Term Limits Day.
Boy, this holiday season really sneaked up on me.
No excuse, though, because Term Limits Day falls on February 27th every year. On that date in 1951, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, limiting the president to two terms in office.
Call it the constitutionalization of the small-r republican example George Washington set so well by voluntarily stepping down after two terms as chief executive. That “tradition” lasted for nearly 150 years . . . until FDR sought and won a third term in 1940.
In addition to presidential limits, tomorrow let’s also cheer term limits on 15 state legislatures (including big states such as California, Florida, Ohio, Michigan), and those covering 36 governors as well as thousands of local elected officials, including in nine of the nation’s ten largest cities.
Of course, while we celebrate Term Limits Day — in this pandemic, mostly on social media — let’s remember where mandatory rotation out of elected office does not exist, yet is most desperately needed: Congress.
Since career politicians aren’t going to term-limit themselves, U.S. Term Limits has launched a “national effort to bypass Congress and put term limits on House and Senate through the Term Limits Convention.” The convention requires 34 state legislatures to take action and that in turn requires us to act at the grassroots in our states.
Already there is impressive movement. In the last week, resolutions for a Term Limits Convention have passed through key committees and entire chambers in Arizona, Georgia, and North Dakota. Much more is in the pipeline.
Term Limits Day, tomorrow, makes a great day for a contribution to the term limits cause. But there’s no time better than the present.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Tim Eyman strikes again.
In deep blue Washington State, the ballot measure activist celebrated another Election Day victory last week with Initiative 976, limiting vehicle taxes. Not to mention Referendum 88, whereby voters kept a ban on government use of racial preferences, enacted via an initiative Eyman had co-authored two decades ago.
And still, there were a dozen more issues on last Tuesday’s statewide ballot thanks to Mr. Eyman’s 2007 initiative, I-960, which mandates “advisory votes on taxes enacted without voter approval.” (Also thanks to state legislators, I guess, for racking up 12 new tax increases this year without bothering to ask voters!)
Yet, perhaps it matters not at all. Nearly two million votes cast on each of these measures? Three supported by a majority? Nine rejected? Two esteemed Evergreen State newspaper columnists pooh-pooh them as “meaningless.”
“The Legislature has never taken the voters’ advice when they say a tax should be repealed,” writes Spokane Spokesman Review columnist Jim Camden.
That’s a failing of the Legislature, Jim,* not these advisory measures . . . which you seem to acknowledge when you write that these votes at least “provide a good control group for any experiment on the voters’ knee jerk reaction to higher taxes.”
If legislators cared to know.
While dumping on the dozen measures as “an empty remnant of an earlier initiative,” The Columbian’s Greg Jayne notices that “their presence on the ballot this year reminded voters, over and over again, of the Legislature’s spendthrift ways.”
Helping create an anti-tax mood that spurred support for I-976.
Not bad for being meaningless.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I use his first name because I know Mr. Camden from decades ago when he was a reporter covering House Speaker Tom Foley, who after suing to overturn the 1992 citizen initiative for term limits became the only Speaker defeated for reelection since the Civil War.
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Three measures on ballots today are particularly worth watching.
Two issues in Washington State represent the only citizen-initiated measures out of 32 propositions voters will see in eight states: Washington Referendum 88 allows voters to re-decide the issue of racial and gender preferences, so-called “affirmative action,” while Washington Initiative 976 offers voters a chance to cap their vehicle taxes.
More than two decades ago, in 1998, Washingtonians passed Initiative 200 to end racial and gender preferences in state employment and education. This year, the state legislature enacted a virtual repeal of I-200, by allowing the state to employ such a preference provided it was not the “only factor” used.
Washington’s vibrant Asian-American community, which stands to be discriminated against should affirmative action return, rose up to petition Referendum 88 onto the ballot. A “yes” vote upholds the legislature’s new pro-preference policy; a “no” vote restores the prior voter-enacted policy prohibiting such preferences.
Initiative 976 is yet another effort from Tim Eyman, the state’s most prolific initiative practitioner. “This measure,” as the official summary states, “would repeal or remove authority to impose certain vehicle taxes and fees; limit state and local license fees to $30 for motor vehicles weighing 10,000 pounds or less, except charges approved by voters . . .”
Like virtually every Eyman initiative, powerful opponents have dramatically outspent supporters — by greater than a 6-to-1 margin — funding ads that have been less than truthful. Additionally, government officials have broken campaign laws in pushing a “no” vote.
Nonetheless, a mid-October poll showed 48 percent of voters support I-976 against 37 percent who oppose it. Could Eyman again thwart the state’s behemoth Blue Establishment?
Lastly, New York City voters will decide a ballot question on whether to use ranked choice voting in future primary and special elections for mayor, city council and other offices. It would mark a major victory for a reform growing in popularity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Our Constitution guarantees that each state of the union provide a republican form of government.
Does that mean that all that is prohibited is . . . monarchy?
No.
One very common form of modern governance is deeply anti-republican, requiring — at the very least — strict regulation to prevent it from usurping our form of government. And what is this dangerous variety? The kind an economist defined centuries ago: “We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania.” He called it “government by desk,” or, “bureaucratie.”
Yes, bureaucracy.
You might think I’m about to launch into another attack upon the Deep State, perhaps in relation to the ongoing coup-by-desk of the Trump Presidency.
But no. Let us turn to the other Washington, the one with the capital named Olympia.
In that hotbed of politics-as-usual, the city government printed out and mailed — on the public dime — a pamphlet entreating voters to vote against I-976, a state-wide initiative that had been advanced onto the ballot by Tim Eyman* and hundreds of thousands of voter signatures.
Even if it had been a broadside for the initiative this would have been very, very bad.
In republics, those who inhabit public desks must not be allowed to hijack election campaigns from those who are, ultimately, in charge: the citizens.
And in Washington State by law: RCW 42.17A.555 broadly and strictly prohibits using public resources for campaigning.
Apparently, public servants in the Evergreen State (as elsewhere) do not see that they themselves can corrupt our form of government.
Which makes this government-printed pamphlet a very serious breach of law indeed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* You may remember me talking about Eyman before — often. I have called him the most effective limited-government activist in these United States. And it is from Eyman himself that I learned of this story.
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On Wednesday, I said we should, to borrow the vernacular, “have a conversation” about a national referendum.
Billionaire investor, environmentalist, and Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer proposed the idea, which I’ve loved conceptually since my friend, former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel (also a Democratic presidential candidate), first advocated it decades ago.
But that ol’ devil — he’s in the details. (Decidedly not the latest lingo.) What might a national initiative and/or referendum process look like?
Given that it would require a constitutional amendment — meaning ratification by 38 of the 50 states — the process must win broad support to be enacted.
Here’s what I propose: Allow any statutory initiative measure to be petitioned onto a federal General Election ballot with signatures equaling 6 or 8 percent of the country’s population* and as verified by election officials in each state. Require a concurrent majority, whereby for a measure to pass it must garner not only a majority of the vote nationally, but also a majority vote in at least 20 states — or even in a majority of the states.
An initiative proposing a national constitutional amendment should do more. Require, say, a petition signature threshold of 10 or 15 percent and not merely a majority of the vote nationally to pass, but mirroring the current amendment process, mandate a majority in each of at least 38 states.
If U.S. Term Limits is successful in getting 34 states to call a convention to propose an amendment for congressional term limits, a national referendum process could follow in those footsteps.
Talk about two ideas that will pop blood vessels in the heads of professional politicians and their special interest cronies!
Dare to dream.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* This should simply follow the figures of the most recent census, of course.
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