Philip Blumel:
And the winner is … Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of April, 20, 2020. US Term Limits executive director Nick Tomboulides and I chat this week about four students and their award winning essays on term limits. Hey Nick. An interesting note came across our desk last week about a competition at a small university in West Virginia called Shepherd University. Apparently every year for the last so many years there’s been a competition where students will write papers about the effects of term limits or potential effects of term limits on the US Congress.
Philip Blumel:
Once again this year, the contest was held and there were awards given and four students from Shepherd University won, Joshua Walker, Jacob Cross, Jonathan Beetler and Zachary Runyon. Congratulations to these four for writing papers that were recognized by the program and awarded. And I think they all got small stipends for use towards tuition and whatnot, so congratulations to all of you.
Nick Tomboulides:
Yeah. That’s a really cool story. Also we’d like to give a shout out to the Congressional Term Limits Foundation, which is apparently the sponsor of this, which is a nonprofit that’s based in Baltimore. I guess it started around 2012, so kudos to them for doing this. It’s great to see the youth of America talking about term limits because it’s their generation that gets trampled the most by this runaway train of incumbency that we have. There’s basically this no vacancy sign on the US Congress, which means don’t bother running against one of these people. It’s a waste of your time. Kudos to them for starting this, for writing about it, for discussing it. Not all of them were for term limits by the way within the essay contest, but it’s great to have the discussion. It’s great to have the exchange of ideas.
Philip Blumel:
Something else I found interesting in reading over these is that it gives some indication about what information you find if you just go out onto the internet and start researching something largely from scratch. Because I could tell from these papers that most of them are written by students that really had not much familiarity with this idea before. They were piecing this together and they found these studies and they found these editorials, they found this and that and they found the poll link and it’s interesting to see what was most immediately available to them.
Philip Blumel:
I found that really illuminating. So one of the things I found most interesting is the works referenced in the final pages of their papers. I look down at the studies and some of them are flat out from lobbies like the National Conference of State Legislatures and League of Women Voters and groups that are very actively out there opposing term limits. There’s some stuff from US Term Limits, other organizations. So that was fascinating to me too. It also shows how much work we have to do to get the word out there in a proper way so that these students will find real information and not just self-interested information from groups that benefit from opposing term limits.
Nick Tomboulides:
Yeah, that is I think the major problem with term limits scholarship. That’s so much of it is polluted by the disease of self-interest. It’s been funded and produced by people in whose best interest it is to keep term limits at bay or abolish the term limits they have, such as state legislators. So much of the papers, so much of the academic research out there on term limits, it literally relies on polls of legislators and lobbyists. So the researchers, so-called researcher will walk into the Capitol, Bozeman for example and say, “Hey, Mr. Legislator sir, whose vast wealth and vast fortune is now threatened by term limits, can you tell me whether term limits are a good idea or not?”
Nick Tomboulides:
Then they just scribble the answer down verbatim. You might as well ask a toddler to set his own bedtime. We need a revolution in term limits scholarship. We need to look at hard objective data like are you making elections more competitive? We know we are because we know open seats have more candidates. Are you making the legislature more diverse? You know you are because a long time ago we used to elect only old white guys. Now we don’t do that anymore. So I think in light of the national toilet paper shortage we have right now, some of these anti-term limits papers could make for a suitable replacement.
Philip Blumel:
Anybody listen to this that thinks he’s exaggerating, we go through an enormous number of these studies. We collect them as you can imagine and you would not believe the number of papers that actually are based on surveys of stakeholders. They don’t call them polls. Surveys of stakeholders, which of course mean the people that are in office or feed off that, lobbyists, journalists, bureaucrats, and a lot of these are just qualitative studies. They come up with things that they decide that term limits cause polarization, as if that doesn’t exist in places like Congress where there’s no term limits, but they come up with these qualitative things that aren’t really based on any hard research or numbers. There’s certainly research out there where we’re looking for correlations and are looking at real numbers. And when you do that, you end up with a very good case for term limits because those numbers are out there.
Nick Tomboulides:
Right. And by the way, we know the American people are not buying what the anti-term limits people are selling, otherwise, 82% of Americans wouldn’t support this issue. So despite the Herculean efforts by the political ruling class to try to destroy this issue, to try to convince people it’s not a good idea, 82% of people still support it because they look at Congress, they look at their state legislature and they say, “Give me a break. We need term limits.” But you know what?
Philip Blumel:
Nobody is paying them to say otherwise.
Nick Tomboulides:
No. There are a lot of kind of superficial claims that opponents can make that sound good at a surface level, but when you dig a little bit deeper, you realize it’s not really true. I’ll give you an example. One thing that came up in some of these papers, it was the longer you do a job, the better you get at it. We hear that sometimes. It’s the experience argument. They try to lump in being in Congress with that. I want to give you my take on this and see what you think. I agree with that principle generally. I think doctors become better doctors the longer they practice medicine. I think businessmen become better businessmen the longer they run a business. The longer you do a job, the better you get at it, the longer you do a job. The reason I don’t think that applies to Congress is because Congress doesn’t do their job. Their job is to represent and address the needs of their constituents. Their job is to become experts in policies, but what they do instead is beg for money all day and run for reelection.
Philip Blumel:
I would counter that a little bit because I think they envisioned their job as being that and they do get better at it. They get better at politicking. They get better at raising money. They get better at the networking, all the surface things that we as Americans don’t really think as being central to their job, but to them it is central to their job. And yeah, they get better at that, but that’s not to our benefit.
Nick Tomboulides:
But we know constitutionally from a civics perspective their job is to represent their constituents.
Philip Blumel:
That’s right. That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides:
And to follow the Constitution, but they’re not becoming experts in that. They’re becoming experts in electioneering and sloganeering and grandstanding and most importantly raising money. Ronald Reagan said it best, “Politics, it’s the world’s second oldest profession, but it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
Philip Blumel:
That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides:
Shout out by the way to Zach Runyon of Shepherd University. We’re going to give him the bad-ass college student of the year award for his awesome paper on term limits.
Philip Blumel:
Yeah, that was good. That was well organized and really made the case well I thought.
Nick Tomboulides:
We’ll see if we can’t actually get his permission to put that on our website so everyone can read it because I think it makes as good a case for term limits as anything else. It’s really well done.
Scott Tillman:
Hi, this is Scott Tillman, the National Field Director with US Term Limits. US Term Limits has a very aggressive pledge program. When term limits comes up for a vote in a state legislature or in Congress, the number of legislators who have signed our pledge is the best indicator we have of success. We focus on pledges because pledges work. A pledge takes away all uncertainty for the voters and for the candidate. As a rule, voters don’t trust politicians, but they trust them a little more if they sign a pledge. Once they have signed the pledge, legislators are unlikely to change their mind on the issue or work against us. Pledges take away uncertainty for both candidates and legislators. After signing, they quit contemplating and consider their position on an issue decided. Candidates and legislators will sign pledges, but they must be asked. Very few come to us.
Scott Tillman:
We must ask them and they must be asked multiple times. They often need to be asked by multiple people. Asking in-person is always the best, but phone calls and emails also work well. We ask candidates for the state legislature and candidates for Congress to sign a pledge that will help us put term limits on Congress. Last week we had 36 new signers on our pledges. 70 members of the US Congress have signed our pledge and this cycle, 145 non-incumbent candidates for Congress have also signed the pledge. We also have over 650 state legislators and candidates for state legislature that have signed our pledge to term limit Congress. If you have access to a candidate, please ask them to sign our pledge. Pledges are available at termlimits.com.
Philip Blumel:
Have you checked out a US Term Limit’s live stream on Facebook lately? Ken Quinn is the host of this periodic program and is joined in informed conversation by other members of US Term Limit’s team including Ron Hooper and Ken Clark. Friend us on Facebook and you’ll receive invites and links. Here’s an excerpt of a recent live stream event.
Ken Quinn:
Okay? If you are watching this right now, folks, elections are going to fail you. I want you to understand that. Now, this is where what we are working on comes to play because this is something that the framers understood and I want to share two quotes with you today that I really like. Okay. This is James Wilson, one of the delegates to the convention. He also was the ratifying delegate in Pennsylvania. This is what he said. “The Congress may be restrained by the election of his constituent parts. If a legislature shall make a law contrary to the Constitution or oppressive to the people, they have it in their power every second year in one branch and every sixth year in the other to displace the men who act thus inconsistent with their duty.”
Ken Quinn:
And if this is not sufficient, so what he’s saying, if the elections don’t solve the problem and we know they don’t, they still have a further power. They may assume into their own hands the alteration of the Constitution itself. He’s talking about amendments, right? So he’s referring to Article Five. The last quote here I want to share is James Madison. He says the same thing and there’s three ways to control government, and this is what he said. “In the first place, the responsibility, which every department feels to the public will under the forms of the Constitution, they may be expected to prevent the excess incident to conflicts between rival and unresponsible authority.” So what he’s saying is this, they should be responsible. You elect them, they should go do the job they’re supposed to do and not go beyond their bounds. Okay? So that’s number one.
Ken Quinn:
Number two, in the next place, if the difference cannot be adjusted by friendly conference and mutual concession, the sense of the constituent body, that’s us, the voters, brought into the government through the ordinary elective channels may supply a remedy. Okay, number two, vote amount. Drain the swamp. Get better people down there, right? That’s what we all think should happen. Well, if that fails, he says this. “And if this resource should fail, there remains in the third and last place that provident article, Article Five in the constitution itself by which an Avenue is always open for the sovereignty of the people for explanations or amendments as they might be found indispensable.” That is what we’re talking about, Article Five for term limits.
Philip Blumel:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. It is a tragedy for our nation that professional politicians who do not face significant electoral competition and are so distant, so divorced from the concerns and needs of working Americans that they are at the helm during this current crisis. It’s enough to make you sick. America needs term limits on its Congress. You’ve signed already, I know, but let’s get our friends and family to sign the online petition for congressional term limits. Go to termlimits.com/petition. Copy that webpage address and send it to everyone you know with a note urging them to sign. We’ll be back next week. Thank you.
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