Term limits
I just came back from the shopping center and noticed a person asking for signatures to get term limits on the ballot in California. I don’t like term limits. They’re superficial. They don’t solve any problems, they only shift the symptoms around. Why do we want term limits, when we already have the power to vote candidates out when we don’t want them any more?
The arguments in favor of term limits boil down to power and choices:
- Donor money favors incumbents.
- The two-party system doesn’t offer true choice.
But term limits don’t solve either of those problems. They do nothing about the first one and they only exacerbate the second by forcing good legislators out along with the bad.
Money favors incumbents because they have power that they can offer to donors. That doesn’t change with term limits. All it does is shift the reward from re-election to something else such as post-service jobs and gifts. As long as it is easy for legislators to offer legislation that favors their donors, the problem will remain.
If we want to reduce the incumbent’s advantage, we need to reduce the amount of money the incumbent has available to hand out. Inessential services need not be funded by the federal government; and essential services can be funded through voucher-style plans that put the power of distribution directly in the hands of the voter.
We also need to limit the ability to pass donor-purchased legislation in secret. The removal of earmarks is one big step towards this, and a database of spending is another. When a bridge to nowhere can’t be hidden in a 200-page bill, but rather has to be its own bill, it’s going to be a lot harder for a legislator to offer that bridge as a quid-pro-quo.
Those solutions will be a lot harder to enact than term limits, but they have the advantage of being real solutions that reduce the incentive to buy representatives.
If you don’t like the choices that our current two-party system offers, term limits won’t change anything other than the names. Further, term limits will ensure that when Democrats or Republicans accidentally offer a candidate you do like, they’ll be term-limited just like everyone else, and the odds will favor a bad successor.
In 2007, even what’s shaping up to be our third-party options are looking a whole lot like the big two.
If we want to encourage the parties to offer real choices, we need to remove the artificial roadblocks to third-party elections. Restrictions on ballot access make it far more difficult for third parties to get on the ballot than for Democrats or Republicans; campaign finance laws make it more difficult for third parties to fund their campaigns than for Democrats or Republicans. Removing these obstacles would go a long way towards ensuring that our elections are regularly infused with new ideas, and that the two main parties would have to address these new ideas.
Presidential term limits
How well do term limits work for presidential elections? The most common candidate to follow a term-limited president is that president’s vice president. It’s hardly increasing our options when George Bush follows Ronald Reagan and Al Gore follows Bill Clinton.
Was a four-term FDR presidency really so bad? Would it have been better to have the Democrats focussed on choosing a new candidate in 1944? Would a three-term Reagan presidency really have been so bad? It would have changed the entire dynamic of the last eight years: it’s easy enough to understand why Saddam Hussein would think that a Bush I real-politic administration would stand aside when he invaded Kuwait; even with many of the same cabinet in place, it’s hard to imagine Hussein thinking a Reagan administration would stand aside.
And while I personally would not have wanted a third Clinton term, those who approved of him did not seem to approve of him as the lesser of two evils but rather as a positively good candidate. And remember that Clinton never received a majority of the popular vote. If he hadn’t been term-limited out, his opponents might have chosen to confront this and offer a candidate that the majority could support.
Why do we really want term limits?
In a healthy system, we wouldn’t care about term limits. It seems to me that if we don’t like the choices we’re being presented with, we should look at why that happens. We should solve the underlying problem rather than shift symptoms around.
- Real Term Limits: Now More Than Ever
- “To effectively end politics as a lifetime sinecure, thereby making congressional service a leave of absence from a productive, private-sector career, requires that terms be short. A dozen years is a short career, but it is more than long enough for legislators to become more concerned about their relationships with each other—logrolling and the like—than about their relationships with constituents.”
- Term Limits
- “A term limit is a legal restriction that limits the number of terms a person may serve in a particular elected office. Term limits are found usually in presidential and semi-presidential systems as a method to curb the potential for dictatorships, where a leader effectively becomes ‘president for life’.”
- Porkbusters
- “blogging the waste out of government”
- The Importance of Ballot Access
- “Active and vigorous third parties play a vital role in maintaining the health of our two-party system.”
- What we’re up against
- “Incumbents get enormous free publicity, so they need less money for advertising. And special-interest groups are glad to fund-raise on their behalf, presenting incumbents with $50,000 or more in $1,000 donations they’ve bundled from their members. These groups will do this for an incumbent, but not for us, because the incumbent is in a position to provide favors in return.”
More reigning in bad laws
- Justice conjured is justice denied
- Blunting criticism of bad laws by exempting nice people.
- Has welfare failed us?
- Has welfare failed us, or have we overwhelmed the welfare system through other policies that encourage dependance and discourage economic development?
- We’re all Scooter Libby now
- The justice system is out of control for everyone, not just for highly-placed politicians. Fixing it involves more than a presidential pardon.
- The curse of modern legislation
- What would happen if our representatives actually read bills before voting on them?
- Maintaining Educational Diversity
- A state-run education is ever a danger to a liberal, free country. At any time, demagogues can take control over the education of nearly every child in the country.
- 10 more pages with the topic reigning in bad laws, and other related pages
More Nobody For President
- Don’t wait—capitulate
- The ACLU’s doomed campaign against telecom immunity is a classic example of why you have to be willing to vote for Nobody if you want to be taken seriously in politics.
- Vote Nobody in 2008?
- Staying at home doesn’t send a message. Voting based on issues rather than party does.
- How not to convince your reps
- Copyright reform is likely to go the way of medical marijuana unless its supporters are willing to vote for candidates that do something about it.
- Nobody wants immigration reform
- “Immigration is not a problem to be solved.” A confident and successful electorate could understand that issues are more important than who you hate. Unreasoning partisanship, however, is a problem that often seems as if it has no solution.
- Nobody Isn’t Partisan
- Partisanship always trumps principle, but this year is worse than any I can recall. If Nobody were on the ballot, he’d have a good chance of winning. With the election as close as any in recent years, Nobody might still garner a majority.
- Three more pages with the topic Nobody For President, and other related pages