Sometimes we write stuff here that won’t move the public needle but we do it to get something off our chest and into whatever public discussion flows from these pieces. Truth be told, these columns have limited readership and since I don’t mess with Facebook or other social media platforms (I have a life and it is not lived between my thumbs), this wisdom reaches only a few feet from the mountaintop from which it is dispensed.
But today, we need to expose term limits for the hypocritical entity that they are. And the hypocrisy that voters showed in approving them thirty years ago this year.
We related some of the problems a few days ago. There are two major points today, one that can be made in just a few words and the second one that will take a little more. The point, however, is the same—term limits are voter apathy and voter hypocrisy at their worst:
The first point is one we’ve made before—that voters gave up their right to vote for the people who represent them in the legislative chambers when they adopted a law saying they did not want the right to vote their state representative a fifth term or their state senator a third term.
They just threw away their votes.
Voters said we must have term limits to get new, fresh blood into our governments—-and then immediately contradicted themselves.
The same voters who approved limiting Missouri House members to only four two-year terms voted in the same election to return 53 members to the House of Representatives for a fifth term.
Of that 53, four were returned for their ninth term, one for a tenth term, two for their eleventh term and one for his SEVENTEENTH term.
Two years later, Missourians voted for 36 of these same people for still another term and gave fourteen others a fifth term or more.
And in 1996 voters sent 22 of them back again! And they gave 13 representatives fifth terms.
The last person affected by term limits to serve in the House of Representatives, as far as we have been able to determine, was Chris Kelly of Columbia, who was elected to his ninth and last term in 2012 after having been away from the House for several years. He could have run for a tenth term but did not.
In all, Missouri voters who think term limits are good public policy have voted 263 times to elect state representatives to a fifth term (one was elected to a 19th during this time).
The Missouri Senate, a much smaller body, has seen voters send its members back for more than two terms 32 times.
That’s almost 300 times for both chambers of our legislature. .
And what does that say?
It says that if voters have a chance to vote for someone they like, they’ll do it. But those voters of 1992 decided you and I won’t have that opportunity.
The second point is that term limits miss the target. The real issue is POWER. Instead, term limits cripples SERVICE. The most dangerous people in our political system are the people in power. They set the agendas. They decide what legislation will be heard in committees or debated on the floors of the House and the Senate. They are in positions that attract financial support that hey might wish to share with a favored few.
Terms limits can be, should be, applied to those who can manipulate the system. Speakers and Presidents Pro Tem have the power. The Governor and the Treasurer have policy and financial power in state government and limiting that power is a safeguard as would be limiting the years a person can lead a legislative body.
There is no doubt that incumbency has its advantages at campaign times. But the answer to that advantage is not in taking away the right to vote for that person again instead of for an opponent. It is in making challengers more equal in presenting their cases. Reforming the way campaigns are financed is an answer. The challenge is in finding a constitutional way to do it.
One way to start is to change term limits laws to apply to those in power and to restore the citizens’ right to pick their public servants.
Will voters reclaim their right? In today’s political climate, it’s extremely doubtful regardless of how much we owe it to ourselves as voters and our system to do it.
There are people who are dying today to keep their version of democracy alive. We smug Americans who too readily wrap ourselves in our flag and use it to justify all kinds of dubious remarks and actions cannot fully appreciate how desperately millions of others want to hang on to something we regard so casually and irresponsibly and are willing to give away with so little thought.
But term limits are what we have and that’s what we are thirty years after Missourians gave away their right to vote for those speaking for them in the chambers where our laws are made.
It’s worth noting that voter discontent in 1992 was directed primarily at Congress. The General Assembly was caught in the crossfire. Ironically, the term limits imposed by voters on Congress in the same election were stayed by the courts, I seem to recall, until at least half the 50 states adopt similar limits on their congressional delegation. Regardless, term limits not only limited voter choice but also shifted lawmakers’ conception of obligation from the voters they serve to the lobbyists who use independent campaign funds to get them re-elected… not to mention pack my corner gas station with illegal one-arm bandits. Recall that the signature gatherers who worked to put term limits on the ballot had a guy dancing around dressed as a black cat with a plackard that read “Webster” rather that “Goode” or “Griffin.” It has never been disclosed — until now– that at least some incumbent democrats were confident A.G. Nixon would knock the measure off the ballot because of signature irregularities. There were two people in the pro tem’s office when Nixon called Mathewson to inform him this would not be the case. I was one of them. I’d never heard Mathewson swear, but his response to Nixon was something to the effect of “You no-good motherfucking son-of-a-bitch before he slammed the phone down. Mathewson knew. We all now know what a bad idea it is. A workable compromise would be to lift term limits off the Senate, but leave them on the House, keeping pressure on lawmakers to behave, but let voters keep the good ones in the legislative branch. But I don’t see much inclination in the General Assembly toward workable compromises. Unlike illegal slot machines, workable compromise doesn’t fund private jets and all the places they take the unelected who really run this state.