BREAKING NEWS: Sen. DeMint to drop term limits bill!

Great news: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) will soon be launching a Constitutional amendment bill to limit terms of the U.S. Congress!

I am often asked by reporters and talk radio hosts what it would take to achieve Congressional term limits. It is a big project and will take the right conditions to get the job done.

First, I say, we need the people on our side. Check.

Second, we need historically low approval ratings on Congress. Check.

Third, we need political leadership. Check?

Yes, it looks we finally have that too. The remarks below are excerpted from U.S. Senator Jim DeMint’s podcast of October 22, 2009. Senator DeMint, who voluntarily limited his tenure in the House of Representatives to three terms, is announcing the imminent launch of a bill to Constitutionally limit terms.

Take it away, Sen. DeMint:

"The longer I stay in Washington, the more I have come to realize that the problem in the federal government isn't just the people...it’s the process.

"The system itself is so much more powerful than either party or interest group, let alone one president or congressional leader. In Washington, the rules of the game are rigged—in favor of bigger government, higher taxes, more debt, and the time-honored system of political back-scratching of 'go along to get along.

"The fact is, party doesn’t matter when it comes to reform. If you want to change the policies, you have to change the process. That’s why in the next few weeks I will introduce a new constitutional amendment to limit members of the House of Representatives to three terms (which is six years), and members of the Senate to two terms (which is twelve years).

"As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork—in short, amassing their own power. Since all that power is going to disappear in a few years anyway, term-limited legislators will be far less likely to make compromises with the system.

"Opponents of term limits say that the nation needs wise and seasoned leaders to lead the nation through crises and find consensus on difficult issues. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve got now.... How do you think it’s working out for us? It wasn’t the People who gave us a 12-trillion dollar debt, trillion-dollar deficits, 100-trillion-dollar long term shortfall in Social Security and Medicare, the Wall Street and auto bailouts, and the health care takeover. It was those wise and seasoned leaders, who enjoy lives of privilege almost wholly immune from the consequences of their policy failures.

"Term limits are not enough, of course. I hope my amendment will eventually be ratified, and then followed by other structural reforms to make our public institutions more transparent and accountable. But term limits are a good start. Because if we really want reform, we all know it’s not enough just to change the congressmen—we have to change Congress itself."

The fourth thing we need to win is for grass roots activists to raise such a clamor that this bill cannot be ignored and Congress members are afraid to vote against it.

So please, right now, go to the U.S. Terms Limits website and sign the on-line petition reiterating Sen. DeMint's call for term limits. And send around the link to all your friends and associates of all political persuasions.

If not now, when?

After vet fiasco, Florida pol returns with new anti-term limit gimmick

Oh no, not again. Florida State Sen. Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton) is again pitching a Constitutional amendment to weaken Florida’s popular and successful 8-year term limits law.

Bennett is not so deaf to the will of voters that he doesn’t recognize the popularity of the law he is attacking. It’s just that he doesn’t care. He knows he has to come up with some way to get around voter sentiment, so he has once again been rummaging around the bottom of the careerist politician garbage pail for ideas.

Last session, he tacked on an anti-term limits amendment to a bill would extend a popular property tax discount to a broader group of disabled veterans. He got jeers and laughs, but not the votes.

This session he is hawking a new gimmick to fire up support for incumbent entrenchment. His new offer you can’t refuse -- according to the Tampa Tribune’s Catherine Dolinski – is to extend 12-year term limits to city and county offices as well. Get it? That way, he can claim a vote for this bill is a vote for term limits!

Of course, citizens in all the counties and cities that worked so hard to collect the signatures and the voters that approved all the existing local 8-year term limits referenda may object. But they weren’t going to support Bennett’s bill anyway. With this clever stroke, he aims to clinch the support of local incumbents throughout the state and many term limits supporters who may not be paying close enough attention.

Will it be enough? I doubt it. Such a proposal would have to go to the voters first, and the threshold for Constitutional amendments is 60%. We must be vigilant always, of course, but right now the only attention his new idea demands is a rolling of the eyes.

Colombia's Uribe to skirt term limit -- again

Here we go again: Latin American leader loves power, won’t respect Constitutional term limit. The latest in this growing queue of dishonor is Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Of course, he's been on this ride before.

Uribe goaded the lower House yesterday into approving a referendum to relax the country’s constitutional term limit and continue to hold office for a third term. The vote was 85-5 with 76 abstentions. The bill has already passed the Colombian Senate. Keep in mind this is the second time the term limit – originally one four-year term – has been relaxed for Uribe. The first time was in 2005.

Uribe's 2005 victory over term limits emboldened Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who famously announced, bluntly and accurately, that “Chavez is not leaving, Chavez stays…” It took Chavez two referenda to get the job done. In the first in 2007 he had not used sufficient bribery or intimidation to get it through, but by the second in early 2009 he had got the recipe right. Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Bolivia's Evo Morales changed their constitutions -- and term limits -- shortly thereafter.

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was less fortunate. It turns out Honduras is not constitutionally permitted to have a referendum to relax term limits. His illegal insistence on doing so got him kicked out of his country in a bloodless coup.

Clearly, there is a good reason for this extra constitutional precaution in Honduras. Latin America has a history of caudillos who will not relinquish power, ever. As a result, Constitutional reforms were made across the region to protect nations from presidents consolidating sufficient power to organize mass constituencies, bribe legislators and steal elections, establishing permanent Castro-like (or U.S. Congressman-like!) incumbency.

In the United States, we view term limits as a good government reform that empowers citizens relative to public officials. To view term limits so casually is a luxury of our stable democracy. In Latin America and many other parts of the world, term limits are one of the last safeguards against tyranny.

Next in line: Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who is currently promoting a referendum for a new constitution that ditches term limits.

In light of this this continent-wide attack on democracy and rotation in office, one has to respect Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who has announced numerous times that he would respect his nation’s constitution and will not seek a third term. “I think that the transfer of power is essential for democracy,” he said.

Lula’s right. And it takes a term limit with teeth to ensure a transfer of power.

Rand Paul: Like Father, Like Son

Following the announcement earlier this month that incumbent and fellow Republican Jim Bunning is not going to seek reelection, Rand Paul officially declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate representing Kentucky.

Paul, a 40-something opthalmologist from Bowling Green, has never held political office but he has gained quite a bit of campaign experience from helping his father, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, and name recognition through his leadership of the Kentucky Taxpayers United, an activist organization affiliated with the National Taxpayers Union. He said he would go to Washington as a true citizen legislator.

Like his father, Rand is a supporter of Congressional term limits. In a recent interview with the Liberty Maven blog, he was asked if he supported term limits and whether he was willing to term limit himself. Paul was clear: "I support both a Constitutional amendment and/or legislation if it could be done Constitutionally. Voluntary term limits have not worked because the good Congressmen kept the pledge and went home and the creeps broke their pledges and stayed. Also, only a very small percentage, maybe ten to fifteen, ever were elected with a voluntary pledge." Fair enough.

He is currently leading with this popular message in his stump speeches. Early polling show Paul to be a contender and his fundraising has been phenomenal so far, bringing in over $740,000 in just a few months, including a Kentucky record of $430,000 in one day.

Last year another committed term limits supporter -- Florida's Rep. Tom Rooney -- snuck into Congress. Maybe we'll see another, perhaps many others, in 2010. After all, polls show popular support for term limits at an all-time high and incumbents at a low.

Let's pop this question to all Congressional candidates during the next election cycle: Do you support Congressional term limits?

Luther Martin, term limits prophet

I am reading an informative and humorous little book called Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin by Bill Kauffman. Martin was a representative of Maryland at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and an example -- exasperating to many -- of the so-called anti-federalists who feared the new Constitution would centralize new and nearly unlimited national powers. To protect Americans' liberties, the antis clamored for, among other things, a Bill of Rights and term limits. They got the former but not the latter.

In the debates over term limits, Virginian George Mason -- often called the father of the Bill of Rights -- pointed out that "nothing is so essential to the preservation of a republican government as a periodical rotation."

Martin argued vociferously, as apparently it was the only way he knew how, that the entrenched politician "will take his family to the place where the government shall be fixed; that will become his home, and there is every reason to expect, that his future views and prospects will centre in the favors and emoluments of the general government." It is in lines like these that Luther earned the title 'prophet' in the book's title.

But not only the anti-federalists feared an entrenched incumbency. Federalist G. Livingston of New York imagined the elite life of political lifers thusly:

In this Eden they will reside with their families, distant from the observation of the people. In such a situation, men are apt to forget their dependence, lose their sympathy and contract selfish habits ... The senators will associate only with men of their own class, and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people. They should not only return, and be obliged to live with the people, but return to their former rank of citizenship, both to revive their sense of dependence and to gain a knowledge of the country.

The anti-federalists are labeled by history as the losers in the Constitutional battle, but their many contributions to the Constitution -- tributes to their obstinancy and adherence to principle -- greatly improved that document and helped it preserve rather than threaten liberty.

Time has proven the antis correct on term limits. However, to be fair, it took quite a while for their dark predictions to materialize, as rotation in office was so much part of the revolutionary (small-R) republican creed that it wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that the professional politician became the norm in the Congress and legislatures across the country.

Many of the delegates who supported rotation in office but felt that term limits were unnecessary never dreamed of Congress members holding their seats for decades. The antis did, and slept fitfully upon leaving Philadelphia.

Tea partiers: Term limits now!

The "tea party" movement is no longer a one-time phenomenon in response to corporate bailouts, stimulus spending, money supply inflation and ballooning government debt. On July 4, over 1,300 more tea party demonstrations were scheduled across the country and -- once again -- calls for term limits were ubiquitous at these events.

It is no wonder. Unemployment is approaching double digits and companies and banks are closing their doors every week. The stock and real estate markets are in the tank. But while people are suffering from the bust, the federal government is enjoying a boom. It is playing the profitable game of Reverse Robin Hood: using the crisis as cover for taking money from the public to bail out and/or pay off specific corporations, banks, unions and other important political constituents.

If citizens believe they are not being represented, they are correct. Incumbent Congress members retake their seats about 95% of the time with minimum of effort, as they either run unchallenged or face vastly underfunded challengers, often gadflies. They hold these seats for decades and then run the Congress by right of seniority. As demonstrated by the Cato Institute, tenure in office is highly correlated to increased spending patterns. Hence, the unbeatable who spend the most run the show.

This is true under Obama and Pelosi as it was under Bush and DeLay. Clearly, last November's election didn't provide the change it promised. Real change will require severing the comfortable relationships between entrenched incumbents and special interests. It will require citizen access to reins of government via rotation in office.

Heed the voters in the streets: it will require term limits.

Honduran military steps in to enforce presidential term limit

Like his mentor Hugo Chavez, (former?) Honduran President Manuel Zelaya needed to get around his country's constitutional term limit to hold on and extend his power over this Latin American country.

While the president has no power under Honduran law to hold a referendum to make consitutional changes, the president announced he would do so anyway. When the nation's army chief Gen. Romeo Vasquez refused to distribute the ballots for the illegal election, he was fired. When the Honduran Supreme Court mandated the reinstatement of Vazquez, Zelaya refused.

The army put down Zelaya's attempted coup with a coup of its own.

"Zelaya has provoked this institutional crisis," said Michael Shifter, a Latin American analyst at Washington's Inter-American Dialogue. "He seems to have a very strong appetite for power. He's trying to be the victim, but he won't get a lot of sympathy by defying the country's institutions."

In the United States, we view term limits as a good government reform that empowers citizens relative to public officials. To view term limits so casually is a luxury of our stable democracy.
In many other parts of the world, term limits are one of the last safeguards against tyranny.

If the action by the military is in good faith, it will soon step aside and permit the elected rotation in office that the Honduran constitution requires and the people deserve. The interim leader, Roberto Micheletti, says that presidential elections will be held as scheduled and that he will step down in January when Zelaya's term would normally expire. We'll see. One of the temptations of power that make term limits so crucial is that politicians always believe that they are indispensible. This hubris comes with the job.

In Colombia, president Alvaro Uribe is next in line to try to overturn his presidential term limits, although like American politicians he is relying solely on legal machinations to hold on to his power. Stay tuned, as the Latin American term limits saga continues.