Category: term limits

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initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

The Limits of Corruption

Republican Speaker, Larry Householder, bribery

Another corrupt, term-limits-hating, careerist politician bites the dust. 

“Federal prosecutors say Republican Speaker Larry Householder and four others — including a former state GOP chairman — perpetrated a $60 million federal bribery scheme,” reports the Dayton Daily News, “connected to a taxpayer-funded bailout of Ohio’s two nuclear power plants.”

Last year, a citizen-initiated referendum campaign sought to give voters the final say on the legislature’s $1.5 billion baby. “The relentless machinations of HB 6’s backers,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes points out, “kept [that] repeal effort launched against the bill off Ohio’s ballot.”

At a news conference to explain the arrest of Householder and his co-conspirators on racketeering charges, federal prosecutors detailed some of the ways the scheme illegally blocked last year’s referendum effort. 

Now, the rush is on to repeal House Bill 6.

Mr. Suddes is correct that “[t]he legislature also won’t be OK till voters amend the Ohio Constitution to make it easier to place issues on the statewide ballot for up-or-down votes.” 

But when he goes on to argue that term limits are “part of that problem”?

The only thing Ohio’s term limits need is to make the limits lifetime — forbidding legislators from returning after a timeout. Householder had previously been speaker from 2001 to 2004. “While he officially left office due to term limits,” informs the Plain-Dealer, “he departed Columbus amid an FBI investigation that closed without charges.”

Householder also came to our attention back in March, when he called Ohio’s eight-year limits “pretty oppressive.” Before the pandemic, he was pushing a ballot measure designed to weaken the term limits law and serve until 2036 — foreshadowing what Putin* did later in Russia. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I referred to them as “two pols in a pod,” but now, Householder reminds me more of former Arkansas State Sen. Jon Woods, who after sponsoring a deceptive ballot measure to weaken term limits was convicted on multiple felony charges and is serving his current term in prison.

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initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs term limits

He Tries Harder

Putin, Russia,

He’s the Avis Rent A Car of authoritarianism. 

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is not the most evil tyrant on the planet. That title clearly belongs to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Instead, Putin is No. 2. 

So, of course, he tries harder.

Two years ago, Xi Jinping got the Chinese Communist Party to jettison his term limits without breaking a sweat. Not the slightest pretense of democracy necessary. 

Two weeks ago, Putin finally caught up with Xi by winning an unnecessary and highly fraudulent national referendum designed to legitimize the constitutional jiggering that would allow him to stay in office until he would be 83 years old. 

Beating Joseph Stalin for post-tsar star tsar.

So, how did Putin rig the referendum? 

“Voters are being asked to approve a package of 206 constitutional amendments with a single yes-or-no answer,” explained National Public Radio. Many U.S. states have single-subject requirements for ballot measures to prevent precisely this sort of log-rolling.

Sergey Shpilkin, a well-known Russian physicist, produced statistical evidence that “as many as 22 million votes — roughly 1 in 4 — may have been cast fraudulently,” ABC News reported.

“The European Union regrets that, in the run up to this vote, campaigning both for and against was not allowed,” read a statement from the 27-nation block. With little debate and scant information, the referendum was just pretense.

So, why did Putin go through all the trouble to pretend?

Low approval ratings, a New York Times piece argued, his “lowest level since he first took power 20 years ago.” Putin needed all the help that fake democracy can provide.

Without any of those uncomfortable checks-on-power that real democracy demands.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Coburn’s Terms

Dr. Tom Coburn, Thomas Coburn,

Over the weekend, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kent.) was single-handedly battling the entire Congress, another fighter with the inner courage to stand up against the Washington mob was sadly losing his battle with cancer. On Saturday, Dr. Tom Coburn passed away at age 72.

Honored in his day with the sobriquet “Dr. No,” Coburn the obstetrician had delivered 4,000 babies; Coburn the congressman had “frustrated Democrats and Republicans alike,” The New York Times explained, “with his propensity for blocking bills.”

When Coburn successfully blocked $150,000,000 in proposed new government spending, the Washington Post derisively called it “chicken feed.” In this space, we used this term: priceless. 

“His contempt for [career politicians] is genuine, bipartisan and in many cases mutual,” noted The Times, adding that Coburn “once prescribed a ‘spinal transplant’ for 70 percent of the Senate.”

Dr. Coburn challenged the House rule prohibiting him from continuing to practice medicine while in office. “They’re really killing any idea for representation outside the clique of good old boys,” he argued. “It suggests people can’t believe in term limits and serve in Congress.”

He won.

Tom Coburn pledged to serve no more than three House terms and kept his word. Four years later, he ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat, likewise pledging a two-term self-limit* — becoming “The Conscience of the Senate.”

“One of the reasons I’ve been such a pain in the neck up [in Washington],” offered Coburn, “is because I knew I was leaving.”

Dr. Tom Coburn was one of us — a representative, and not a politician. He will long be remembered by those who love our Republic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “I believe more than ever,” Coburn said in keeping his self-imposed three-term House limit, “that our nation’s problems have been created because career politicians have set themselves apart as an elite class of people trying to dictate to us how we run our lives.”

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Dr. Tom Coburn, Thomas Coburn,

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Putin (and Householder) for Life

Putin, term limits, power,

For the last 20 years, Vladimir V. Putin has served (himself) as either Russian president or prime minister, switching offices to get around the nation’s term limits. 

“In the past, Mr. Putin proceeded cautiously, seeking to preserve a veneer of legitimacy,” explains The New York Times. “Confronting term limits in 2008, Mr. Putin opted for a four-year hiatus as prime minister while his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, became the caretaker president.”

Required to step down in 2024, at the close of his second consecutive six-year term, Putin is not leaving. 

Legislation proposed and passed this week by the Duma, if approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court and by voters in an April plebiscite, would re-start the autocrat’s term limits clock, allowing the 67-year-old to stay in power until 2036 . . . to the ripe old age of 83. 

Putin told the Duma that someday “presidential authority in Russia will not be, as they say, so personified — not so bound up in a single person,” but that day is clearly not at hand.

“If he serves until then,” the Times informs, “Mr. Putin will have held the nation’s highest office for 32 years, longer than Stalin but still short of Peter the Great, who reigned for 43 years.”

The Times also notes that “Mr. Putin joined President Xi Jinping of China and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, authoritarian leaders who have extended their rule.”

Not mentioned? Ohio’s Republican House Speaker Larry Householder,* who calls his state’s voter-enacted term limits “pretty oppressive,” and is pushing an initiative amendment for this November’s ballot that will do in Ohio precisely what is being done in Russia: ignore all previous years in office, allowing Householder to hold power through 2036. 

Just like Putin. Two pols in a pod.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Mr. Householder’s GOP credentials are somewhat questionable. A recent headline asks, “Will the Marriage Last Between Larry Householder and Democrats?”

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Putin, term limits, power,

Photo by Global Panorama

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Legislators Turned Lobbyists Turned Altruists

Michigan, term limits,

Legislative bosses, the state’s most powerful special interests and a fake grassroots organization teamed up a month ago to figure out how best to attack Michigan’s popular term limits law. 

Now comes a lawsuit demanding that a federal court overturn these 27-year-old voter-enacted limits.

“I’m just sitting here watching five former legislators, who are now lobbyists, sitting in the conference [room] of another lobbyist in Lansing talking about how the courts should rescue them from the voters,” Patrick Anderson, author of the 1992 term limits law, told MIRS.* 

Self-serving? Not at ALL. “When you take the most experienced people out of government,” asserted John Bursch, the legislator-lobbyists’ attorney, “it shifts the balance of power to career bureaucrats and to lobbyists.”

So, clearly, these kind, meek, caring lobbyists are altruistically rejecting more power and influence for themselves and, instead, working selflessly for the greater good. No wonder everyone loves lobbyists.

In pursuing the legal approach, Bursch did acknowledge, “We think it would be very difficult to put anything on the ballot that would be successful.”

Their legal rationale is as implausible as their putative public-spiritedness. The lawsuit contends that term limits deny legislators the opportunity to gain law-making competence while also listing all the wonderful legislation these legislators-turned-lobbyists once passed . . . when working under term limits. 

It’s not a legal argument, either way, but which is it?

“I’m having trouble,” offered Rina Baker with Don’t Touch Term Limits, “remembering a single moment when I wished any of the plaintiffs were still in office.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Unfortunately, this capitol insider publication is behind a paywall, so no link is available.

Michigan, term limits,

from photo by Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit News

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Term Limits Apply to Socialists,Too

Bolivia, term limits, democracy, elections,

We don’t see a lot of pro-term-limits writing in our major, “corporate” media outlets — but a New York magazine account of the ouster of Bolivian President Evo Morales is a welcome exception.

“The disgraceful and chaotic manner in which the once-beloved Morales is leaving office is an object lesson in why presidential term limits are important,” writes Jonah Schepp. “Running a country for more than a decade has a tendency to make people more susceptible to authoritarian impulses, whether or not they started their careers as dictators.”

The Atlantic also acknowledges term limits’ vital role. “Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia,” the “too far” being the “authoritarian powers” claimed “in the name of the popular will.” Yascha Mounk explains how Morales’ once-touted support for presidential term limits evaporated in 2016, when he placed before voters a binding referendum to allow him to stay in office indefinitely. Bolivians voted No, only to witness their supreme court set aside term limits using the bizarre rationale “that limits on the length of his tenure in office would violate Morales’s human rights.”

After irregularities in the October 20 presidential vote, Bolivians took to the streets. Morales resigned on Sunday. 

“For a socialist president who was until recently hailed as the great success story of the Latin American left,” New York’s Schepp explains, “this unseemly end serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when world leaders remain in office for too long.”

On a 2015 trip, President Obama remonstrated African leaders for their attempts to overturn popular term limits. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said before the African Union, “I’m looking forward to life after being president.”

Mr. Morales, Bolivia’s now-former president, is not so fortunate. Yesterday, he fled the country. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bolivia, term limits, democracy, elections,

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