Philip Blumel:
Show down at the less than okay corral. According to the coauthor of the landmark 2018 study on term limits and state budgets, the competition between congressional incumbents and challengers is greater than the competition between the two parties. Yes. Even in these polarized times.
Philip Blumel:
Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of May 11th, 2020.
Stacey Selleck:
Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel:
Let’s look a little closer at where the real battle lines are drawn in the US Congress.
Philip Blumel:
I’m reading a fascinating book. It’s called Political Capitalism: How Political Power is Created and Maintained. It’s written by Dr. Randall Holcomb, an economic professor at FSU, well known for his work in public choice theory. We’ve discussed Dr. Holcomb here on the podcast before, because he’s the author of the best modern term limit study we know of, the one that shows a correlation between term limits and state budgets. If you recall, he looked at States with term limits and those without term limits during the periods before and after term limits were adopted in 1990s. His statistical work indicated that state government spending growth was reduced in term limit states, compared with those states that did not enact legislative tournaments. And this is evidence that the power of special interest lobbies in these States were effectively diminished by term limits.
Philip Blumel:
Fascinating work. Well, anyways, he’s at it again, and his new book, he looks at what is commonly called crony capitalism and argues that the capture of the economic system by elites is not just a deformation of capitalism, but really can instead be viewed as a separate economic system and compared to capitalism and socialism and others. But it’s a fascinating book. Much of it, of course, is outside the purview of this podcast, but there’s one chapter in it that really hits home for term limit supporters, and I wanted to share it with you.
Philip Blumel:
He argues in this chapter that even at a time when partisan polarization appears to be it’s at its ugly peak, “The more significant dimension of political competition is between those with power versus their challengers for that power, not the competition of one party versus another.” In other words, those that have political power conspire to keep it and have more in common with each other, other incumbents that is, then with others in their same party who don’t have power.
Philip Blumel:
So in the book he talks about because of the shared class interest, incumbents have worked together in creating institutions, both good and bad, that serve the personal interests of the legislatures that created them by favoring incumbents over challengers. He gives a list of examples. These include the seniority system, for one, which makes it difficult for challengers to beat incumbents. Of course, there’s nothing in the constitution in setting up the legislature about a seniority system, it’s something that is created by the institution itself, that to say by the incumbents in that institution itself. And closely related to that is another institution, the committee system, which gives the incumbent special power or advantage that the challenger would not have if they were elected.
Philip Blumel:
Now, of course, there’s lots of reasons for these inventions, but the fact is that they were adopted is to a large measure due to the fact that whatever their merits, they also happened to benefit incumbent legislators. Is that fair to say? Of course it is. Think about the issue of term limits. And here we have a nearly universally popular institutional reform, but it doesn’t serve incumbents interests. And this is the reason why they’ve not enacted it. I mean, what if a popular idea like this did serve incumbent interests somehow, how long do you think it would take for them to enact it?
Speaker 3:
This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel:
Anthony Wiener is a former New York city council member, and six term Congress member best known for a sexting scandal with multiple women, which led to his resignation from Congress. In 2009, Wiener planned to run for mayor of New York City as mayor Michael Bloomberg was term limited out of office, or so it appeared. Instead of respecting the eight year term limits law approved by voters, twice Bloomberg made a bargain with the New York city council leadership to extend both the mayors and council term limits to 12 years, giving mayor Bloomberg another chance in office. Wiener, no friend of term limits, told the story to Alec Baldwin in 2016 on Baldwin’s radio show, Here’s The Thing.
Anthony Wiener:
That was so jarring to me because it was really, even for someone who’s a politician for a long time in New York city who understands how things goes, the sheer gall of it, of a rich guy buying-
Alec Baldwin:
Buying it for the third time, actually they spent a hundred million or 90 something million on the previous-
Anthony Wiener:
Well, if you add it all together, it’s a quarter of a billion dollars we know of.
Alec Baldwin:
Right.
Anthony Wiener:
And then it’s all the walking around money there. But that part, having a free spending guy is one thing, but he basically bought the newspapers to do this, right? I mean, you don’t get away, how would you get away with over, just for your listeners who aren’t steeped in New York, the voters of the city of New York put term limits in. I’m not a big, big fan of term limits. Never have been. The voters then again, we’re asked to consider it a few years later. They, again, reaffirmed it, says we still want to do it.
Alec Baldwin:
How was the city council empowered to set it aside?
Anthony Wiener:
Well-
Alec Baldwin:
Is that the way the law was written?
Anthony Wiener:
No, it’s, you can … well, it’s a good question. I believe, and it was challenged in court and I believe you can make a pretty good argument that there should be a hierarchy of things, and when the voters vote on something, the only way to undo it is when you do it, we don’t do a lot of referendums in our city. We just don’t do it. And so this-
Alec Baldwin:
It’s not California.
Anthony Wiener:
Right, it’s very unusual. And so this was an unusual construct. This was one of those rare cases that the city of New York had done something by voter referendum. So the city council said, it’s a law like any other, will we make laws and pass laws all the time we can get out from under it. I think the courts made a mistake in acknowledging that, but the courts generally speaking really do let legislatures do their thing unless they think there’s a real important reason to step in. And at any rate, the city council and the mayor who had repeatedly said he would never support changing term limits, and the city council repeatedly said they would never change it. So they ran, they both campaigned saying they would ever do any such thing, it was so foreign and you can’t imagine it was such an unpopular thing. And it was about 75% of New Yorkers wanted it to stay, 75% so voted to put them in in the first place.
Anthony Wiener:
And that kind of an undoing of the public will, not withstanding the substance, I don’t care about term limits, I mean this case had impacted me, I’m the poster child for who it impacted because I was going to run, but it was so offensive to me, I really could not imagine it would ever happen. Like the very scaffolding of citizens relationship to their government was now being undone. Right? Because it’s one thing to change a law, that happens, and even a popular law that happens. When you start saying, we’re going to put something out to vote for you, the people, and we’re going to kind of discard it for our own self interest-
Alec Baldwin:
There’s a psychic toll there.
Anthony Wiener:
There’s a banana Republic sense to it as well. I mean, and this is New York City. This is not like some sleepy town. So my position was, if you want to do this and you believe it’s the right thing to do, let people vote again. And I said, I will join you in putting that on the ballot, if that’s what people say then so be it.
Anthony Wiener:
But I had seen what it was like to run against a billionaire and I had to decide whether I wanted to do it again, and remember something else that actually really complicated the decision for me, Barack Obama just been elected. There was this notion that finally we in Congress, have all these things I wanted to do that I was telling you earlier, you really don’t do, you just sit around and do nothing, or you’re in the opposition party, you could do like healthcare reform. Holy cow, you know, the stimulus, like these things that we were on the verge of doing. So like when I, I think I wrote an op ed in from New York Times explaining why I made the decision I did, it’s not often you get a chance to kind of, like a lot of people say, well, I want to spend more time with my family. That’s why [inaudible 00:07:59].
Anthony Wiener:
I really did want to go back to Washington to get some stuff done. It was no longer, like I didn’t have this sense that it was now or never. I was now leading all the polls. I thought I could maybe wait for some more time. But it was very painful, because that I thought I was my moment and that it didn’t work out. I think it’s a scar on Bloomberg’s legacy that really can’t be removed.
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 for success. Last week we had over 80 new state legislative candidates sign the pledge. We now have over 800 state legislators and candidates for state legislature who have signed our pledge. If you have access to a candidate, please ask them to sign our pledge. Pledges are available at termlimits.com.
Philip Blumel:
And more blatant than these then seniority and the committee system is the franking privilege. This is the ability of legislators to send mail at no charge, which is basically simply campaign mail, free campaign mail. All right, add this to the fact that they get paid staff in both the Capitol and their home districts and they get government paid travel expenses. Meanwhile, their challenger is trying to raise money the old fashioned way in order to send campaign mail, they have to hire staff. And of course they’re buying their own plane tickets. All these special privileges of course are on top of the quite natural privileges that come from higher name recognition and constant news coverage that incumbent enjoys simply by the fact that they’re creating news to cover, of course, challengers try to raise sufficient money to overcome these privileges of incumbency, and for this reason incumbents favor, campaign expenditure limitations.
Philip Blumel:
Yeah, I know there’s good reasons that can be made for such restrictions. But the point here is that it’s more than just a coincidence that these restrictions were adopted when they so clearly benefit the incumbents. A person in this country can only give $2,800 to a federal candidate for office. Keep in mind when an incumbent announces his reelection campaign, the coffers just start filling automatically with money from PACS and other special interests. Not so for the challenger. Regarding these campaign spending limits and other campaign finance reforms, Dr. Holcomb writes “If incumbents were more aligned with members of their own party, whether incumbents or challengers, then with incumbents of the other party, they would favor a more level playing field. Or if they were in the minority party, they would support advantages to challenges such as term limits that could increase their party’s representation. Yet all incumbents favor, those incumbent advantages, most of which were put into place by incumbent legislators themselves.”
Philip Blumel:
I’ll finish with one last example. And this is my favorite, really, because I’ve never thought of this before. Dr. Holcomb points out that the election of members of the house of representatives are chosen from single member districts rather than at large districts, so that incumbents do not have to compete against other incumbents in elections. That’s right, under single member districts, each representative has monopoly power over the representation in that district. Now the constitution gives each state a number of representatives proportional to its population, but doesn’t specify that representatives have to be elected in single member districts. And in the past States have had all kinds of schemes and arrangements, including at large districts and even a multi-member districts. But now, single member districts are universal, in part because of the advantage that they give incumbents. And of course, single member districts led to another institutional arrangement created by and beloved by incumbents, gerrymandering.
Philip Blumel:
So let’s finish with another word from Dr. Holcomb, “Because elections tend to pit members of one party against another, it is easy to perceive competition among parties, but the more significant dimension of political competition is between incumbents and challengers. The elite band together to enforce their elite status.” Indeed they do. Thank you, Dr. Holcomb
Philip Blumel:
Have you checked out a US Term Limits live stream on Facebook lately? Ken Quinn is the host of this periodic program and is joined in informed conversation by other members of the US Term Limits 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:
Whenever I do a presentation, I like to just ask this question. And the question is this, take a guess how many amendments Congress has introduced to the US constitution since 1789? And some people will say, ah, I don’t know, 53, a hundred. The answer is over 12,000. Over 12,000 amendments have been introduced to the constitution. That is just incredible. Now these are not amendments that were proposed to the States to get ratified. These are just simply amendments that were introduced. So any member of Congress can stand up on the floor of the house or the Senate and introduce an amendment. And then that amendments will typically get referred to a committee. And that committee may have a hearing on it. They may break up and discuss it. Some of these might get to a floor for a vote, but it just shows you the process. On average, about 150 amendments are introduced every Congress.
Ken Quinn:
Now out of the 12,000, only six of these well, 33 were actually proposed. So out of 12,000 amendments, 33 were proposed to the States for ratification. Now, if you go through that spreadsheet that I showed you, I think term limits on Congress has been introduced over 200 times. Last year alone, in this current Congress, the 116th, we’re looking at 12 term limit amendments. So 12 of them have been introduced. The two that I highlighted are ours. Those are the ones that have been introduced by Senator Ted Cruz and also representative Francis Rooney. That’s our amendment. The other ones are different.
Ken Quinn:
Now this is the problem, folks, if you’re watching this, Congress will introduce amendments all day long. And a lot of these are great amendments. It’s just, we can never get enough good people with the right principles to get the two thirds needed to pass it so that the states can ratify it. And so that’s why we’re going about this through article five, through the States.
Ken Quinn:
So what I’m trying to share with everybody is listen, folks, article five, the amending provision gives two methods of proposing amendments. Either Congress can do it, or the States can do it. It’s equal authority. The States have never introduced under article five, one single amendment. And so what we’re trying to do is we want to use the same mechanism that Congress takes advantage of virtually every single day they’re in session. We want the States to finally use their authority.
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.
Philip Blumel:
Thank you.
Stacey Selleck:
The revolution isn’t being televised. Fortunately you have No Uncertain Terms Podcast.
Speaker 10:
USTL.