Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Wednesday, January 19, 2005. In reading in the papers about another piece of embarrassing proposed state legislation, I realized finally, after many years of consideration, a single reason to support term limits.
Overall, though, holding legislators from the community through state levels to a maximum number of terms is fundamentally un-democratic. It limits the power, however misused or underused, of the voter. It also says that those who support term limits, including voters, believe voters overall are idiots and incapable of voting rascals out of office.
However long rascals stay in, they must be serving a majority or they wouldn’t be there. Rascals deserve to stay in until a strong-enough opposition can defeat them in an election, otherwise the opposition won’t seem strong enough to govern. (Term limits for the single executive does make sense to prevent monarchy or worse.)
But term limits do have one appeal:When out-of-staters ask about an embarrassing piece of Arkansas legislation, that they’ve read in the odd-news column or as a filler, the matter no longer is compounded by the detail that the idiot lawmaker had been re-elected by his district 22 times.
The doofus just got re-elected for the first time, got a committee chair and doesn’t know much better. -30-
