Undoing the Will of the Voters

Back in the mid-90's there was a strong movement in many states to enact term limits on elected officials. Although term limits on members of Congress were struck down by the Supreme Court (to the detriment of all of us), state limits remained in effect. In California, I think that's been a good thing, though many former members of the State Legislature have gone on to other elected positions (such as the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles).

John Fund tells us that there are moves underway in many states, including California, to undo the will of the voters and relax or eliminate term limits. The reasoning behind those efforts is weak:

This desire is bipartisan. A majority of Idaho voters supported term limits four times during the 1990s, but in 2002 that state's Republican-dominated Legislature overrode GOP Gov. Dirk Kempthorne's veto and passed a law repealing them.

In New York City, the Democratic City Council is contemplating subverting the will of the voters by voting to extend its own members' term limit to 12 years from eight. That puts councilmen on a collision course with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who thinks turnover on the council is good. He also supports the existing two-term limit on his own tenure. "The public has spoken twice, and they've spoken quite clearly," the mayor says. "I don't know that you should keep shopping for a different answer."

But that's exactly the kind of shopping that California politicians are now looking to do. This month state legislators are rushing to put together a package deal for the voters this November, under which would give up their power to draw their own districts if in return they get a chance to stay in office longer.

California's term limits are increasingly under attack for allegedly making the Legislature even more dysfunctional. A steady stream of recent articles have blamed the limits for increasing the power of lobbyists and destroying the Legislature's institutional memory. Critics urge an extension of limits to 12 years, rather than the current limits of six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate.

The critics protest too much. Mark Petracca, a liberal who chairs the political science department at the University of California at Irvine, notes that lobbyists actually dislike term limits because they have less influence with a steady influx of unpredictable new legislators. "It's no surprise that business and labor interests have long been reliable opponents of term limits," he notes. "There is no systematic evidence that lobbyist power has swelled under term limits."

Other groups have obvious self-interested reasons to oppose term limits. "Journalists who cover politics hate term limits," says columnist Jill Stewart, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. "They must cozy up to a new bunch of lawmakers every time the old bunch is forced out. They have to develop new sources and--Horrors!--update their Rolodexes."

Thanks to term limits, homosexual sex-obsessed Shiela Kuehl will be leaving the Senate this fall, to the benefit of all of us. There's no telling the damage retaining her in office could have done to our State.

Voters need to stay vigilant. The pols will try to sneak this stuff past us if we're not paying attention.