In the past 20 years, we’ve had every single state-wide office leave in disgrace.
Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin has resigned after he was arrested on charges of campaign finance fraud.
Alan Hevesi, former New York State Comptroller pleaded guilty to the felony charges…
Governor Andrew Cuomo revealing he will resign…
….on the circus in Albany.
Politicians in New York state are out of touch. It’s not a good record.
At Unite NY last year, we ran polling multiple times, and we found some pretty troubling numbers. We found that 56% of voters thought that the State is on the wrong track, four out of 10 voters were considering leaving the state because of our broken politics, and only 10% of voters thought that we were ahead of the curve on election reform. I encounter New Yorkers who are hopeless, they don’t feel like change can actually happen, they don’t feel like their government listens to them. When looking at the national perspective, we see more of the same. We have two presidential candidates running that are combined age of 158 and voters want fresh faces, they want someone new. A lot of them want literally anyone else. The system as it is, is causing bad incentives for elected officials, and it’s not giving voters as many voices and choices as possible. We want to change this from the ground up.
Elected office was never supposed to be your full career. The founding fathers, when they were writing the Constitution weren’t thinking these office holders are gonna be here for 50, 60 years, and that’s gonna be their entire life. They were supposed to be integrated into their communities, hold a job, be with their families, serve their community, and then return to their community. And that’s not where we are right now.
So often when people enter office, they come in for good reasons, and when they get into office, they work on it, it takes a while to adjust to the political world, and then after some amount of time, they can try to make that change. But the thing is, if you let people be in office much longer than that, they’re not there to make a change for their constituents, they’re there just to stay in power. So when someone is an incumbent for a really long time, they can over time build up an incredible war chest that allows them to stay in office, and then once they’ve built up that kind of infrastructure, it can be really hard for someone new to break into that system.
Politicians, once they have the incumbency advantage and they’re running consistently as the person who’s already in the seat, they can win elections over and over again. It is very hard for someone to come in and challenge them and boot them out of power. When we have people that spend their entire lives as politicians, they’re gonna get out of touch, they’re not going to be able to understand what normal Americans are going through. Historically in this country, the people who have held the reins of power have been overwhelmingly white, overwhelming male. It can be very difficult for a person of color or a woman or a minority to break into that system. In New York state, we only just recently got our first female governor. Surely, we can do better.
Now, in the past few years in New York, we’ve seen a lot of progress on voter access. We’ve seen publicly-financed campaigns, Independent Redistricting, improved registration, but despite that, voters aren’t happy. They’re expressing that there are issues with the system as it stands. It seems that the only thing that can make people leave office on the state-wide level is death, the criminal justice system or their own embarrassment. We’ve had really low voter turnout in New York, less than 15%, and we now have more independent voters than we’ve ever had before. So they really deserve a voice, we wanna change the incentives that politicians have.
So term limits are a limit on the amount of terms or years in office that an elected official can have. We have this in a lot of the country, 37 states have term limits for governor, and 16 states have term limits of some kind for their legislatures. In New York City, there are term limits for the mayor and for the city council, and judges in new New York have to leave office at age 70, but state-wide, we don’t have that at all. When looking at the national perspective, as you probably know, the President is limited to two terms, but for Congress, you can serve as many terms as you want. You can serve for 40 years, your whole life. The longest-serving congress person ever, John Dingell, served for almost 60 years.
The bill we’re supporting is as common sense term limits, a three-term limit on all state-wide offices, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Comptroller. Term limits and the perpetual campaign cycle. This frees up elected officials to do the right thing instead of just what’s politically expedient. This means that complicated and important political issues might actually get the attention that they deserve. Thankfully, Unite NY is not alone in our advocacy. Governor Kathy Hochul in her first State of the State in 2022 proposed term limits.
We are submitting a proposal to the legislature to enact two term limits for state-wide officials for government to work. Those of us in power cannot continue to cling to it.
Across the country, nearly three-quarters of Democrats want term limits and more than 80% of Republicans.
Moving forward with sensible term limits can improve how Congress works.
The American people overwhelmingly support term limits, and that’s on a bipartisan basis.
We need term limits, which 75% of us are for. It’s common sense. Let’s get this done.
If I’m elected President, I will push to impose term limits on all members of Congress.
I think you wanna see new voices and new ideas emerge, that’s part of the reason why term limits are a really useful thing.
When Democrats and Republicans can agree on something, probably there’s a reason. Time isn’t a partisan issue. Years aren’t a partisan issue. I think we can all get behind the idea that 12 years is enough if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. I mean even the Green Bay Backers have written into their by-laws that the general manager has to leave at age 70. Why can’t voters in New York have that. Come on.
Thank you very much. Go, Packers Go.
The greatest opponent to term limits is apathy. We need people to stand up and say that they want term limits to their legislators. Without that, change can never happen. Now, term limits alone can’t solve everything. We need to ensure that when office holders are leaving office, they’re replaced by people that are fully representing the voting public, and we can do that with other structural reforms like Ranked choice voting, open primaries, ballot access, ballot initiatives that will allow us to have a truly representative government that we can be proud of. This is a wonderful opportunity to make a difference in a way that is very achievable. There are lots of legislative leaders behind it, and we can make it happen.
Let’s crush it. Bada bing, bada boom. Come on, we gotta do this. I can just keep the catch phrases going.