Philip Blumel: The book isn’t yet written on how Americans place term limits on the US Congress, but when it is, the face of today’s guests might be on the cover. Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms. The official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of September 9, 2019.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: Paul Jacob, former chief of US Term Limits, the nation’s oldest and largest term limits group from its inception in 1992 until 1999, becoming the movement’s leading voice. Jacob helps citizens in 23 states place limits on their congressional delegations, prompting columnist, Robert Novak at the time to call him the most hated man in Washington. Jacob was also at the helm when the Supreme Court of the United States voided those victories in the 1995 split decision, US Term Limits versus Thornton. This week, US Term Limits, Field Director, Scott Tillman talks to Paul, teasing out some history that so far few others except for those who are on the front lines might remember.
Scott Tillman: When exactly did you first get involved in initiatives? I should ask.
Paul Jacob: The first initiative I did was called the tax accountability amendment. It was in Illinois in 1990 and while I was doing it, a friend of mine, Mike Ford from California would call and we would compare notes. He was working on Prop. 140, which was the term limits initiative in California.
Paul Jacob: In 1990 there were three term limits measures on the ballot. There was Prop. 140 in California, that got the most press because of course California being the most populous state. That was fought tooth and nail by Willie Brown who was the long serving speaker of the house, maybe not so affectionately called the Ayatollah of the assembly at the time.
Paul Jacob: Brown raised about $6 million. They ran wall to wall television ads against the amendment. No TV in favor of the amendment. There was a small radio buy to promote Prop. 140, and yet against that on slot Prop. 140 won and that really sent a message around the country.
Paul Jacob: There were two other states that help send a very strong message in 1990. Colorado, which was the first state to limit its own congressional delegation, they not only limited their state legislature, they also put a provision in that limited their delegation to Congress and that really touched off the national effort to limit congressional terms. The other one was Oklahoma, which actually was the first term limits initiative voted on because in the Sooner State, the governor can set the measure at any election. Instead of putting it on the November election I suspect there were some state legislators and federal legislators who encouraged him not to put it on the same election where they were up for a vote and so they voted on it, I believe sometime in September and all three measures won.
Paul Jacob: Then of course US Term Limits formed in 1992 and really spearheaded 14 states on the ballot. That’s the most states to ever vote on a single issue in a single cycle like that. The previous most was I believe 11 or 12 states that voted on nuclear freeze proposals. Some of them advisory, but this was 14 states, including California, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, very large states, a ton of publicity. We were fought in a number of different states, a big fight in Michigan, a big fight in Washington state, big fight in Arkansas. In many of the other states I think they looked at the polling and said, we can’t stop the term limits juggernaut.
Paul Jacob: We ended up winning in all 14 states. The average margin of victory was two to one. That really put a ton of pressure on the Congress. Of course in 1994 we came back with with more states. There are another eight states that passed term limits initiatives and that really helped spur Newt Gingrich and Republicans in the Congress who had been out of power for 40 years, endorsed term limits as part of their contract with America. But that was almost entirely because they saw the power of this issue. There were so many candidates running on it, so many candidates talking about, and these are challengers because in 1994 there were 77 new people who came into the Congress. They were talking about the people in grocery store parking lots, collecting signatures in the hot sun to put these measures on the ballot. Those initiatives were the closest thing in American history to a national referendum and that national referendum was 14 to nothing for term limits.
Philip Blumel: The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank based in Los Angeles, California and is the publisher of Reason Magazine, Reason TV, the Reason hit and run blog and the Reason podcast. In last Wednesday’s episode of the Reason podcast host, Nick Gillespie interviewed our own Nick Tomboulides. in the wide ranging 45 minute episode, the two Nicks discuss the theoretical argument for term limits, adverse pre-selection, California, the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of term limits and in the portion excerpted here how the US Term Limits executive director got involved in term limits in the first place.
Nick Gillespie: How did you get interested in this topic and connected with US Term Limits?
Nick Tomboulides: I started out as a pretty typical political activist. In college I worked on campaigns, volunteered, the whole shebang, and after coming of age in the Bush Obama era-
Nick Gillespie: How old are you if you don’t mind me asking?
Nick Tomboulides: I’m 30.
Nick Gillespie: Okay.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. It eventually dawned on me, it ain’t getting any better. My party is pretty much full of crap. The other guys are full of crap. Third parties are broke. I’m busting my ass trying to get these people elected but once they get in, nothing really changes. I felt like I was being scammed because I was. You had the tea party, you had occupy Wall Street movements with two respective sides and whether you agreed with them or not, they seem to represent a real intellectual debate between more or less government. But most of the politicians who rode those waves, they got elected, they got co-opted, they became part of the machine.
Nick Tomboulides: I lost my faith in politicians at some point. It was like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real. Well, politicians aren’t real either, apparently.
Nick Gillespie: But Santa Claus also has a unlimited ability to tax and regulate you, so it’s kind of the worst of all. You’re not getting any more presents, but you’re footing the bill.
Nick Tomboulides: I’m not saying Santa Claus doesn’t have the same platform as a lot of modern politicians and I’m not saying if Santa Claus decided to run for President in 2020 he wouldn’t win. I think that’s very possible. Going back to this, I was still concerned about things. Debt, immigration, privacy rights, endless war, you name it. I felt called to help in some way help end the racket and term limits were a natural opening for me.
Paul Jacob: Part of the reason that I think you had a lot more initiatives, including the term limits initiatives in the 90s than you had in the 80s and 70s and 60s, when the initiative process was not used nearly as much, is that you really saw at the end of the 80s the kind of the Cold War and politics became a lot more about Washington and the State Capital and City Hall than it was about world, the Cold War and the Soviets. We began to focus a little bit more at home and frankly, people didn’t like what they saw and so they took some action.
Paul Jacob: But if you look back a little further in initiative and referendum, you find that in the teens, the 1920s and 30s there were a lot of initiatives. The 90s was probably the biggest, and I don’t know for certain, but I believe it was the biggest number of initiatives of any decade even since. But there is some ebb and flow and I was surprised in doing just a little research, even during World War II, you saw initiatives in a number of different states, not at the same level as maybe before, but at a stronger level than during the 60s in the 70s when it seemed like there weren’t as many initiatives.
Paul Jacob: Of course, there were some big ones. In 1978 you had Prop. 13 which got a ton of play around the country and really in many ways, some people have pointed to that as the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s campaign and the momentum that helped carry him to the White House in 1980, which is pretty consequential stuff. But what oftentimes people don’t know about Prop. 13 is that not only did it win, did it win two to one, did it win against a ton of money, but after it won, it had a tremendous impact, not just in California but all over the country. There were over 40 states between 1978 selection and the 1980 election that passed some sort of tax reform or tax cut in their own state.
Paul Jacob: It really did spark a tax revolt, and sometimes you can look at the sheer number of initiatives, but there are other times where it’s the importance of that initiative. The reason I point that up is because I think term limits is an issue that people can see very quickly is the sort of reform that’s not ever going to happen if you don’t have the initiative process. I shouldn’t say not ever, but it makes it much, much tougher to convince legislators to limit their own terms than it is to go convince the people that this is the reform needed. The initiative process was just an essential element in bringing term limits to the public.
Scott Tillman: A lot of initiatives today seem to be non-organic in how they get their start. There’s very big organized lobbies that go out and raise money, but we talk about term limits and US Term Limits being involved with 14 and 92 and eight additional in 1994, but almost, I think all of them, not almost, I think all of those are initiatives that started at the grassroots level in the States and US Term Limits came in and assisted them and helped with the organization.
Paul Jacob: This issue just inspires a ton of grassroots involvement and it is true that in most of the cases there were already initiatives going before US Term Limits really got engaged. I worked for [inaudible 00:11:23] citizen for congressional reform, as their term limit project manager back in 91 before I joined US Term Limits, before US Term Limits formed, and so I was working some of that. There were certainly times where somebody wanted to get something going but just didn’t have the connections and we would help connect them to other people. All kinds of ways that at these things take shape. But in terms of the idea and the impetus for it, it came from the grassroots and it was amazing that it seemed like overnight everybody had the same idea let’s term limit Congress.
Philip Blumel: We spend our lives in a bubble of air. We don’t think about it or even notice it until it isn’t there. One thinks to the fish, when she was asked, hey, how’s the water? And the fish replied, what water? After generations of career politicians running Washington, we are so used to its ebbs and flows that is hard to imagine anything different. When thinking about term limits then, it is easy to imagine how the reform could affect only the careerists who run the show now. But under term limits, not only will the rules be different, the legislators will be different too. In the August 20th episode of the Reason podcast, host, Nick Gillespie asks US Term Limits director, Nick Tomboulides about this phenomenon.
Nick Gillespie: What is adverse pre-selection and why is it important?
Nick Tomboulides: So adverse pre-selection is a term popularized by Ed Crane, former President of the Cato Institute, to describe a major problem Congress has today, the fact that it’s not representative. That’s based on how the system is designed.
Nick Tomboulides: Americans who’ve had success in the private sector might like to serve. They might like to help fix the broken system in Washington, but they don’t run because they know it won’t have an impact. Because you need to put in 15, 20 years at least in Congress to have any sort of clout. That means industrious people who refuse to give up their vocations are not going to run. They don’t want to spend that much time in DC with so little impact. So the types of people we need to run are not running. Who is running? Folks who happily look forward to a lifetime in politics. I’ll tell you, Nick, those are not the people who are likely to favor limits on government.
Paul Jacob: The term, limits, was a little different in that it was just popping up everywhere and not just at the state level. As you well know, popping up at the city level. One of the biggest initiatives for term limits was in 1993 when they put it on the ballot in New York City and because Congress had been controlled for so many decades by the Democrats, a lot of the times, Democratic opponents would say, oh, this is a Republican plot. Well, you can’t win big in New York City and claim it’s a Republican plot. It also won in San Francisco and an awful lot of other cities that were very much democratic strongholds.
Scott Tillman: Yes, there’s a lot of examples of that. I think the most recent place where it was a statewide passage of term limits was Nebraska in 2002.
Paul Jacob: It was either 2000 or 2002.
Scott Tillman: 2000 or 2002. They had to run it twice. But we are, we’re seeing, and the main reason we don’t see more of them is because every state that has that process is pretty much passed.
Paul Jacob: The truth is it’d on the ballot and win in other states if they just had the initiative process to be able to do it. I mean, New York, Illinois. In Illinois they’ve tried several times but that process is so limited that every time it gets on the ballot it’s at 75 or 80% in the polls and then it’s sued and they say, oh no, you can’t do it. But the people want to do it.
Paul Jacob: I just wanted to touch on, you mentioned Nebraska and said, I think we had to do it twice, and I just wanted to explain the history of Nebraska because it’s fascinating and it’s somewhat unique in being maybe the worst place in terms of the difficulty in getting term limits passed.
Paul Jacob: In 1992, term limits were put on the ballot in Nebraska. It won with 68% of the vote. It was then sued with people suing saying that we didn’t get enough signatures because the secretary of state and the attorney general and everybody else, including the author of the amendment that had been made years prior, didn’t know what they did and somehow changed the signature requirement. The signature requirement in Nebraska was always the vote for governor. You had to get 10% of that. Well, this court decision, which took everybody by surprise said, oh no, that’s the wrong number. Even though it was the number that for years everybody had gotten and put things on the ballot and passed them, they pretty outrageously changed that number to be too high. Had we known of course we would’ve gotten a higher number and threw out a vote of the people.
Scott Tillman: Threw it out after it had been voted on?
Paul Jacob: After it had been voted on-
Scott Tillman: [crosstalk 00:16:37] signatures.
Paul Jacob: Saying there weren’t enough signatures. Even though we got all the signatures that state officials said you had to get.
Scott Tillman: That’s pretty [inaudible 00:16:45]. You don’t see that very often, where they throw something out once it’s been voted on. Normally their process requires it beforehand.
Paul Jacob: Yes. In fact, there are some states that say once it’s been voted on, you can’t throw it out for any signature irregularity because the people have already spoken now, but that was just step one. That was 92. This decision came with six, eight weeks left before the next deadline. They held it for a while. We decided to heck with it, we’re going to try to put it back on the ballot. The folks in Nebraska were gung ho to do it. We thought that we could help them do it, and we launched the campaign. I still remember the Secretary of State saying that it would take a miracle to get the signatures that quickly.
Paul Jacob: Well, a miracle happened. We got the signatures that quickly. We put it back on the ballot. It won again with 68% and so we then, it sued again, and in the lawsuit they say, oh the people were too confused. They didn’t know whether they were voting for Congress or for state legislature. They wanted the limits for Congress, but surely they didn’t want them for the state legislature. They threw the second victory in the trash. The Supreme Court ruled that the people were too confused, doesn’t count, throw it out.
Paul Jacob: In 1996 there was a retention election for the State Supreme Court Justice who wrote that decision. Never in the history of Nebraska had a Supreme Court Justice been defeated for retention. Usually they get 60 something percent retain. People don’t pay that much attention to those elections. In 1996 we ran a campaign to deny that judge retention. He was denied retention. He didn’t get 60% for retention. He didn’t get 50%. In fact, he got 32%, meaning the same 68% voted no. Not only did that mean he was off the court, but the day after the election, a fellow justice announced his resignation in the wake of all this. It had a big impact on their Supreme Court.
Paul Jacob: Just as an aside, I was there years later when there was an effort against Iowa justices on retention and they were running ads in Nebraska reminding people this wasn’t about them. This was about somebody else. The judiciary in Nebraska I think got a message that you can’t play these kinds of games.
Paul Jacob: We then came back in 2000 I think or 2002, I think it was 2000, and for the third time passed a constitutional amendment to limit terms in Nebraska, and that one was sued as well but the court decided there had been enough and they let that one stand.
Paul Jacob: But it’s the kind of thing where just again and again, you have huge swerving outside the lines from a legal standpoint, a political standpoint, almost anything to stop this issue because they recognize the people love it. It’s simple and straight forward. There’s no complexity really. But it’s a great reform and as much as people sometimes say, oh, it’s just, it’s a meat-ax approach, the idea of term limits is as old as democracy itself. Aristotle in the ancient Greeks, first dealing with democracy, supported term limits. Thomas Jefferson said we shouldn’t ratify the constitution because it didn’t specifically have term limits in it. It’s an issue that has tremendous support. But you can see the kind of machinations that politicians and unfortunately sometimes judges will do to try to block the issue.
Philip Blumel: Term limits sound good in theory, but where’s the evidence? That’s what Reason podcast host, Nick Gillespie, wants to know and US Term Limits executive director, Nick Tomboulides has the answers. To hear the full August 20th interview. Go to reason.com/podcast.
Nick Gillespie: Let’s talk a little bit about empirical results. How many states in the United States or other countries have term limits for members of their legislatures and what do the results show?
Nick Tomboulides: We don’t have the complete data on the rest of the world right now. We’re actually in the process of compiling that. We’re trying to get the most accurate results as possible. I will tell you, executive term limits are a lot more common in different countries than legislative term limits. But here in America we’ve got 15 states that have legislative term limits. All of them were adopted by voters from 1990 onward and those referenda were done with no help from the politicians. Those were done through the petition process, with the exception of Louisiana where it was added to the ballot because they feared the citizens might introduce a petition otherwise with stronger term limits.
Nick Tomboulides: 15 states have it and the results have been very good. You look at rankings of states based on fiscal health. States with term limits are typically clustered toward the top. I live in Florida and I think the Mercatus Center, we’ve had eight year term limits since 1992. I think Mercata center gave Florida its top ranking for fiscal health three out of the four last years and now we’re still in the top five. States with term limits have a higher average ranking in fiscal health than states without it.
Nick Tomboulides: You’ve also seen more competitive elections because definitionally, what a term limit does is create more open seats. You see more candidates vie for office and incumbents are not as powerful because they haven’t been in office for as long, so it’s easier to defeat an incumbent when term limits are present.
Nick Gillespie: That’s a big deal, right? The idea of open seats, because when you look at races for Congress, in particular, the 435 members of Congress around the country-
Nick Tomboulides: Yes.
Nick Gillespie: Very few seats are open or really contested in any meaningful way.
Nick Tomboulides: Exactly. Around 90% of all the elections for Congress are either totally uncontested, meaning you have an incumbent with no opponent. The voters are afforded zero opportunity to vote them out, or under contested, where the incumbent does have an opponent, but it’s a gadfly who’s put his name on the ballot. He’s raised maybe $5,000. Nobody has ever heard of him and he doesn’t really have a chance. A very small number of races every two years are contested and that is because of the power of incumbency.
Nick Tomboulides: Conversely, when an incumbent decides to retire, you see tons of competition in these races. You see a dozen candidates vying for it in a primary because now they know it’s accessible to them. The barrier to entry has come down. Now you can win that seat with a lot less money. You’re not trying to pull a sword from a stone by dislodging or dethroning a longterm incumbent. You have a real shot at winning, so it stimulates electoral competition.
Nick Tomboulides: One of the great fallacies of term limits’ critics is that term limits somehow inhibit voter choice. When you look at the data, term limits increase voter choice by giving us more options than we’ve ever had before at the ballot box. That is true across the board wherever term limits have been enacted.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us again for the No Uncertain Terms podcast. So much groundwork has been laid and so many lessons learned. Let’s keep that momentum growing. The action aim this week is for every listener to introduce the No Uncertain Terms podcast to one new listener. Who do you know who might want to learn about the movement and take action? Let them know the podcast can now be found on Spotify and nearly every other podcast platform as well. Or just send him or her the link, termlimits.com/podcast. Thank you. We’ll be back next week.
Speaker 2: The revolution isn’t being televised. Fortunately, you have the No Uncertain Terms podcast.
Speaker 7: USTL.