Ambushed in Wyoming
I think they’ve all got copies of the same rulebook. Two years ago, two career politicians in Montana a Democratic senator and a Republican senator filed an “emergency” lawsuit against Montana’s term limits law. This was some ten years after voters had passed it. The Montana lawsuit failed, but now the Wyoming Supreme Court has ruled 5-0 to outlaw the statutory term limits which Wyoming voters had passed in 1992 by a whopping 77 percent majority.
As in Montana, the Wyoming lawsuit was filed by two state legislators, a Democrat and a Republican, about to be termed out of office. Yep. Politicians are always cheerfully bipartisan when their entrenched incumbency is at stake. The pair claimed that the voters’ exercise of the right of citizen initiative was “unconstitutional.” Even though it was exercised just as it was intended to be exercised as a curb of the arrogance and excess of officeholders refusing to listen to their own constituents.
Fortunately, not all Wyoming legislators are so cynical. After the decision, Representative Becket Hinckley of Cheyenne immediately proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits once again. If passed, such an amendment could not be unilaterally weakened by the career politicians (who had already stretched a six-year limit to a 12-year limit). And such an amendment could not be unilaterally revoked by the court, either.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed. The battle ahead is going to be a tough one, but in previous fights with their legislators, Wyoming voters have proven they don’t give in easily.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
