Philip Blumel: Will New York elect another indicted Congressman? That’s the question we asked in August 2018. In November, we got the answer. Yes.
Philip Blumel: Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of October 7th, 2019.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: Now, less than a year later, Representative Chris Collins has plead guilty and resigned from his Congressional seat. How does this happen? It’s hardly the first time.
Philip Blumel: Here to discuss the case is US [Term Limits 00:00:40] Executive Director, Nick Tomboulides. Hey, Nick.
Philip Blumel: So, the big news this week is Representative Chris Collins of New York, he pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, lying to Federal investigators after he’d admitted passing private information about this company he was on the Board of, Immunopharmaceuticals, to his son, to help him avoid losses. That is to say, insider trading. Busted. He has pleaded guilty, he acquitted his seat.
Philip Blumel: In spite of when all this was going on, in the midst of this, he got elected to US Congress.
Nick Tomboulides: Right.
Philip Blumel: Yeah. He spent about $1.8 million to do so, even though he knew he was guilty. He had to know there was going to be repercussions down the line, and yet he took people’s money. Spent it, won. Then, dropped out less than a year later.
Nick Tomboulides: What’s fascinating, sometimes the guys who are under indictment, they don’t take people’s money because they can’t find it. Sometimes the guys who are in legal trouble, what they’ll do, is they’ll just finance the entire campaign, or they’ll finance a huge portion of the campaign out of their Congressional office budget. They’ll make the tax payers pay for it. You can do that if you’re an incumbent, you’ve got the [franking 00:01:53] privilege. You can send out mailer, after mailer, after mailer. You can couch it as a “Constituent Update” even though you’re really using it to campaign, and you can send the bill to the taxpayers.
Nick Tomboulides: That might be what he did. We’d have to go in and look at it.
Philip Blumel: Right. Well, Chris Collins is one of the richest people in the House, so he could, of course, self fund. Prior to his Indictment, he was, naturally, funded by all these special interests and PACs, like everybody else.
Philip Blumel: Post indictment, a lot of the money came out of his own pocket. He spent $1.8 million, and he had a challenger that had, basically, no money at all. He was a city councilman in a small town in Western New York. When the indictment came down, the opposing party smelled blood. The opposition to Chris Collins ended up spending, roughly, about the same amount of money, just a bit less, and still lost to this indicted sitting Congressman. I think it really says something about the power of an incumbent over a challenger, even when he’s indicted, and even when the challenger has about an equal amount of money.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. If the legal system can’t take out an incumbent, how do we expect that the voting public is going to be able to do so? As you noted, it’s so rarely a question of, well, can we just replace him with another candidate? Often, there are no candidates to replace him with, or there are no viable candidates.
Nick Tomboulides: The Democrat who go on the ballot, their surrogates and their supporters didn’t realize this was a competitive race until Collins had really gotten into hot water. It’s not as if the voters have a clean and easy mechanism they can use to remove a guy like this. Sadly, you have to wait until the Feds show up, and drag him kicking and screaming.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Philip Blumel: Now, Representative Collins faces a prison sentence of up to 10 years. He was on the Board of this company, Australian company, that had a multiple sclerosis drug that it was working on. The insider information was is that the trials for this drug showed a failure. That information was not public yet, so Congressman Collins immediately got on the phone and told his son, who told other people, and got people out of the stock before the news was public. The price of the stock collapsed.
Philip Blumel: He was really, basically, doing this on behalf of his son and other people. In fact, most of his staff also owned this stock, by the way.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah, he was telling everybody about it. The question in Court was, “Well, who did you talk to about this in Congress?” His response, because he’s a complete moron was, “Well, who haven’t I talked to about it?”
Nick Tomboulides: Seriously, though –
Philip Blumel: I know it.
Nick Tomboulides: – what is the job of a Congressman? It’s to represent the people, right? I don’t know a single person who believes that Congress actually does that.
Nick Tomboulides: There was a poll Gallup did. One third of Americans say their own personal member of Congress is corrupt, a majority say most members of Congress are corrupt, and this is why.
Philip Blumel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nick Tomboulides: It’s the land of temptation. A guy like Chris Collins gets an insider tip that this company’s big drug is about to go bust, and what does he do? He knows his son is going to lose half a million bucks, that’s a big chunk of change.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: So, he sells his stock. It’s almost human nature to do that.
Philip Blumel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nick Tomboulides: We’re never going to change human nature. There’s going to come a time when, all of a sudden, Congress is filled with Saints who aren’t going to succumb to the pressure. What we have to do is change the rules, so the normal people are prevented from going bad.
Nick Tomboulides: What’s scary is, the people we put in Congress are not unusual. They are American citizens, from American homes, American families, American churches, American businesses. The difference is the atmosphere we place them in. We place them in a situation where they face this insurmountable pressure for self dealing.
Nick Tomboulides: How much corruption do you see on your local PTA, or your Rotary Club, or your Volunteer Fire Department? When something is fully understood to be about service over self, it works. When it’s a runaway train of gifts and goodies, it goes off the tracks.
Scott Tillman: Hi, this is Scott Tillman, the National Field Director with US Term Limits. We ask state legislators and candidates for state legislature to sign a pledge to help us term limit Congress.
Scott Tillman: The pledge reads: “I pledge that as a member of the State Legislature, I will co-sponsor, vote for, and defend the resolution applying for, an Article 5 convention, for the sole purpose of enacting term limits on Congress.”
Scott Tillman: Most of us vote for our State, House and Senate members in even year elections, but there are a few states with odd year elections. Louisiana has odd year elections, and they have a very late primary that’s coming up Saturday, October 12th. Louisiana has a jungle primary. A jungle primary is an election where the candidates all appear together, irrespective of party. If one of the candidates gets over 50%, then that candidate wins. If nobody gets over 50%, then the top two candidates proceed to a run-off election, which, in Louisiana, would take place on Saturday, November 16th.
Scott Tillman: We now have over 100 Louisiana candidates who have pledged to support the resolution to term limit Congress. If you have access to a candidate, please ask them to sign our pledge. Pledges are available at TermLimits.com.
Scott Tillman: October 26th, Nick Tomboulides, our Executive Director and I will be at PolitiCon, in Nashville, Tennessee. US Term Limits will have a booth in the exhibit hall. Tickets are available at Politicon.com.
Scott Tillman: Contact us a TermLimits.com if you would like more details on events where you can meet us to discuss term limits.
Nick Tomboulides: President Trump complained about the committee chair term limits. Obviously, Republicans, since the early 1990s, have had a limit of three two-year terms on their committee chairs. What this produces is not real term limits, but what it does produce is some internal rotation, some freshness of ideas, allowing people who just get elected to have a chance to move up quickly and participate, be part of the process.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: Now, President Trump is talking about getting rid of it. One of the things that I found heartening at the time, three weeks ago, was Leader McCarthy, the top ranking Republican in the House, came out and said, “No. I don’t want to do this.” He shot it down.
Philip Blumel: He said, “There’s benefit in new blood.”
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah, he shot it down. Now, just a few weeks later, he seems to be getting sucked back into the vortex of the swamp, and opening up to it again.
Philip Blumel: That’s very frustrating. This rule of having term limits on the committee chairs has been successful, and has been successful for a lot of reasons, and a lot of ways. So much so, that we’ve seen this last year, a lot of the junior members of the Democratic caucus calling on their leadership to do the same thing. What happens is, you get these long-term, entrenched incumbents in these seats, which are the most powerful seats in the Congress, and they’ll stay there forever. Of course, they’ve already been in the Congress for a couple decades to even get that job. That keeps everybody below from being able to get that position.
Philip Blumel: Of course, the connections and the relationships built between these powerful members and the special interest will never get severed, any other way, than without having a regular term limit.
Nick Tomboulides: The argument for not having the term limits is just so stupid. It’s like, a few old geezers we like are going to leave if they lose their committee spots! Okay, great. So what?
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: Why should the public care? There are 20 committees in the house, there’s approximately 200 Republicans in Congress. 200 Republicans. That means, at a given time, 90% of them won’t be chairing anything. The 10% of most senior career politicians get to stay forever, while the other 180 Republicans have to wait their turn? It’s a tyranny of the minority.
Nick Tomboulides: Besides, the real reasons Republicans have no committee chairs has nothing to do with term limits. It’s because they broke their promises, and lost control of the House to the Democrats.
Philip Blumel: That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides: Now, the majority party gets to govern.
Philip Blumel: That’s it.
Nick Tomboulides: If Republicans want to win over the country again, the way to do it is not by trotting out these ancient Sasquatches who were elected 30 years ago. It’s by showing the country newer, younger talent, who are ready to shake things up. That’s how it worked in 94, during the Republican Revolution, the Gingrich Contract with America thing.
Nick Tomboulides: Term limits, it’s not just right policy, it’s also really brilliant politics, as we’ve learned.
Philip Blumel: Well, they’re doing this to appease individual law makers. It’s a pretense to say they’re trying to improve the way that the House is run. It’s specific people that want to hold these positions. For one person that’s be agitating for this is Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, who took over the House Ways and Means Committee in November 2015, when Paul Ryan gave it up to become Speaker.
Philip Blumel: Well, of course, now Brady still has the ranking position, but he’s in the minority party. What he wants the rule changed to be, is that the term limit is for not to be the ranking member of the committee, but to actually be in the majority ranking committee member, which could really stretch that out tremendously, and bogs down the house. It’s basically just for his own self interest, because he wants to hold onto that power, and he wants to be in office when he’s in the majority so he’ll have increased power. It’s really all the argument is about.
Nick Tomboulides: If you’re wondering, though, how long Kevin McCarthy is willing to stick to his principals, the answer is about three weeks. When Trump came out with this idea, McCarthy was the first guy to shoot it down. He’s like, “Oh, I love the idea of fresh blood.”
Philip Blumel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nick Tomboulides: It sounds like something a vampire would say. “I love the idea of fresh blood.” He shot it down.
Nick Tomboulides: Now, just a few weeks later, he’s changing his mind, he’s having back room meetings, back room deals with the other members to try to work this out. It’s disgusting. It’s just so symbolic of the problems we have with the swamp, and why people are fed up.
Stacey Selleck: Hi, this is Stacey Selleck, Digital Director for US Term Limits. I’m excited to announce that we’re offering free digital online training classes to volunteer, starting this week. You decide, which classes to attend. Join us for just one, or as many sessions as you want.
Stacey Selleck: Would you like to learn more about working on social media? Great, we’d love to have you. Do you have a passion for writing, or graphics, or maybe video production? Awesome! You’ll get terrific experience doing what you love. Opportunities are also available for our press and data teams.
Stacey Selleck: All the classes are online. Check out the great webinars at TermLimits.com/Digital.
Philip Blumel: Nick, we’ve been carefully following the Democratic battle for the Presidential nomination. Ken Quinn has done a great job for us, in smoking out these candidates on their position of term limits, and he’s done it again.
Philip Blumel: He was in New Hampshire, and ran into South Bend, Indiana Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, and asked him about term limits. Let’s hear it.
Ken Quinn: Friday, Joe Biden said he opposes term limits for Congress, because he believes the only way to get things done in Washington is with entrenched politicians who have all the power.
Ken Quinn: Where do you stand on the term limit amendment of Congress?
Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, term limits have created a lot of problems in the State Legislatures, I’ve noticed. It’s one of these things that sounds great, and then you watch what happens when you actually get it done. At least, in my experience visiting states where they have it, the more they have term limits, the more lobbyists become powerful.
Philip Blumel: What do you think, Nick?
Nick Tomboulides: I don’t –
Philip Blumel: Have you heard those before?
Nick Tomboulides: I don’t know. He reminds me of every smarmy, know-it-all kid I went to college with.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: Just making little pronouncements on stuff, without having the first clue what the hell he’s talking about.
Philip Blumel: No.
Nick Tomboulides: It just strikes me as intellectually lazy to say, “Hey, even though a state like Florida is doing well, it still has a couple problems. It’s not perfect. Let’s just blame term limits for all that.”
Philip Blumel: That’s really weak.
Nick Tomboulides: I expect more out of my Presidential candidates. I wish these guys would actually just go out and do their research, and learn something about this issue instead of just pretending to know everything.
Philip Blumel: Well, he said he did a little research. He visited these states. “The states I visited that had problems” apparently did term limits.
Nick Tomboulides: Is that your approach when you visit a different state? If you take your family on a vacation to Ohio, and there’s a traffic light that’s not working. Do you just stare at the sky, shake your fist, and say, “Damn you, term limits!” What does that even mean?
Philip Blumel: I know. I guess you do that if you’re obsessed with keeping a position of power, even though the citizens don’t want you to. We’ve stated on this podcast many times, that when you look at rankings of states that have nothing to do with term limits, it usually has to do with fiscal health, or other measures of efficiency, and you look at the way the states rank against each other, and the term limit states are crowded at the top of these rankings. They’re well-run states, generally speaking.
Philip Blumel: When these guys come out and say, “Oh, yeah, it didn’t work in the states,” they are not using any information of any kind to make those kind of statements. It’s very frustrating to hear that again.
Philip Blumel: The other cliché comes with that term limits, power, lobbyists.
Nick Tomboulides: How many lobbyists are there in Washington? I think, 12000? 12000 paid lobbyists who just storm the Capitol every day to infect it like a disease.
Philip Blumel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nick Tomboulides: Are those guys saying, “Hey, we really want term limits?”
Philip Blumel: They hate term limits.
Nick Tomboulides: They hate it.
Philip Blumel: Of course, they hate term limits.
Nick Tomboulides: They hate it.
Philip Blumel: Of course.
Nick Tomboulides: They’re all against it. By the way, lobbyists have a tendency to get exactly what they want. If those 12000 lobbyists really wanted term limits, it would have been the law of the land 30 years ago.
Philip Blumel: Of course.
Nick Tomboulides: I’m still waiting on the first lobbyist to come in here and tell me he wants to help me out. Has never happened, will never happen, because the currency. The stock, and trade of lobbyists is relationships.
Philip Blumel: Relationships.
Nick Tomboulides: It’s not what you know, it is all who you know.
Philip Blumel: Who you know, that’s right. That’s what they have to sell. Term limits sever those relationships in every district, every single six years or eight years, or whatever. In every single district. That is such a frustration, and limits their power so much, due to the fact that their relationships are permanent. Once their established, and the money starts flowing, and the Congress members start acting as expected, there’s no end to it because Congressmen can’t lose elections. Term limits are everything in preventing that from happening.
Nick Tomboulides: If you have term limits, you might get back to a point where lobbyists serve what their original intended purpose was, which was to be a source of information for legislators, rather than having complete, total power and control over them.
Philip Blumel: That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides: There was one more thing I wanted to mention, Illinois.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: We try to keep our listeners up to date on all the corruption stories in Illinois, but there are only 24 hours in a day, so we can’t get to all of them.
Philip Blumel: It’s hard to keep up.
Nick Tomboulides: This time, though, it’s long-time State Senator, Martin Sandoval. His office was just raided by the FBI.
Philip Blumel: Oh.
Nick Tomboulides: Officials looking into allegations he steered business to certain firms in exchange for kickbacks. This comes after the indictment of 50 year Alderman of Chicago, Ed Burke, for using extortion to steer clients to his own firm. You’ve got Alderwoman, Carrie Austin, 25 years in office, also under Federal investigation. Senator Thomas Cullerton’s been indicted recently for embezzlement from a labor union. There’s, without question, a link between tenure and corruption. Illinois is the best proof of it.
Nick Tomboulides: Aristotle pointed this out in 350 BC. He said, “People who hold office for a short tenure can hardly do as much harm as those with a long tenure.” We’re constantly seeing that out of Illinois. It’s interesting. We’re going to continue monitoring it, we’re going to continue finding, recruiting volunteers out there to fight for term limits. They need it, probably, even more desperately than we do in Washington, DC. It’s gotten really bad.
Speaker 8: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: Do term limits cause Jihad? Alabama Congressional candidate, Bob Rogers, seems to think so. US Term Limits activist, Shanna Chamblee, asked Rogers if he’d sign the US Term Limits Pledge, and support term limits, if he were elected to the US Congress.
Bob Rogers: In a lot of ways, I like the idea of having term limits. The downside of it, and that’s the only reason I would be hesitant, and I want to look at this. If we have people like Ilhan Omar of Minnesota comes in, I would hate for her to come into the position she already has, for example, somebody like her. If Shelby had to leave his post because of term limits, it could allow the influx of Islamic people to come in.
Bob Rogers: The reason I say that, I say Islamic people, is because it’s a theoretic ideology. There’s no place in this country for that. That is the bad part about term limits.
Philip Blumel: Thank you for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. GOP leadership and powerful committee chairs, as well as, naturally, the interest they represent, are tying to weaken or abolish the only term limits we have in the US Congress.
Philip Blumel: Quickly, let’s send a message to House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, and tell him not to give in to entrenched Congress members who don’t want to give up their grip on power. Please go to TermLimits.com, and under the Current Actions tab, you’ll find one called, Keep Term Limits on GOP Committee Chairs. There, you can send Representative McCarthy a quick email. When done, please send or post a link to this action to others you know.
Philip Blumel: Whenever a self-interested politician tries to undermine our term limits, they need to hear from us quick and loud. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
Speaker 2: If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe and leave a review.
Philip Blumel: USTL.