Philip Blumel: Do you remember when Venezuela was a democracy? I do. Hi, my name is Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement, published on August 26, 2024. This is episode number 245.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: Last week, the Supreme Court of Venezuela officially certified the victory of President Nicolas Maduro in the July 28th election, in which the socialist leader was seeking a third six-year term. Nearly all observers concur that the election was stolen. Opposition volunteers were expecting foul play, and they collected copies of voting tallies from 80% of the 30,000 polling places in Venezuela. And these slips show that the opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez, won by about two to one. However, the Maduro regime claims to have won by a million votes, and the hand-picked Supreme Court went along with it. Now, this is not the first time. Maduro’s two previous elections were considered fraudulent, and before him, his mentor, Hugo Chavez, was already quite adept at stealing elections, being elected four times between 1998 and 2013. I think you know where I’m going with this. In fact, let me just cut to the chase right here. In countries sliding into dictatorship, term limits are often the last protection that the people have, as the government centralizes and elections mean less and less.
Philip Blumel: Now, of course, I hear politicians here in America all the time that say, “Oh, we already have term limits. They’re called elections.” Oh, that’s just wonderful. Yeah, why don’t you try to tell that to the people of Venezuela this week? In fact, Venezuela did have presidential term limits once upon a time. Let’s go back to 2008. Hugo Chavez was in power. He was elected in 2000 to his first term, and he immediately set upon consolidating and centralizing power as part of what he called his Bolivarian Socialist Revolution. An acolyte of Fidel Castro, Chavez clearly aimed to run this revolution, Caudillo style, indefinitely. But one thing stood in his way, and he knew it. Term limits. According to the Venezuelan constitution at the time, Chavez’s second and last six-year term would expire in 2013. Now, he tried to overturn this pesky limit on his power in the December 2007 referendum, but he was rebuffed at the ballot box. The people voted to retain the term limits. So, in 2009, he tried again. This time Chavez had the election stealing game figured out. He put a new referendum the ballot amid surging inflation and a flailing economy, asking to give him the power to run for office indefinitely.
Philip Blumel: “We’re going to achieve it,” Chavez told his supporters in Caracas. “We’re going to demonstrate who rules in Venezuela.” Then, this head of state and part-time recording artist sang out, Oh ah, Chavez No Se Va. That is, Chavez is not going. Now, knowing what was coming, people took to the streets. By this time, Chavez had been successfully nationalizing businesses, closing down opposition media, sharing his oil money with supporters, fixing elections. His ads dominated the state-controlled media and pressure was put upon his nearly two million state employees to not just vote for but to campaign for this measure. And I recall back then an Associated Press photo, this is January 2009, with the caption, Venezuelan riot police fired rubber bullets against university students in Caracas Wednesday after thousands demonstrated against a proposed referendum to end term limits on elected offices. Student leaders warned of a dictatorship if President Hugo Chavez engineers continuous re-elections. Yeah. But the era of truly free elections in Venezuela was over. In February, Chavez crowed about his alleged victory over term limits at the polls with 54 percent. “Those who voted yesterday voted for socialism,” Chavez said. No longer were any Venezuelan politicians term limited.
Philip Blumel: The cages were opened. The would-be dictators came out and locked the people inside instead. The primary opposition leader at the time was a guy named Omar Barboza, and he said Chavez’s power is enormous with the courts, legislature, and electoral council under his thumb, term limits were the last thing limiting his ambitions. Effectively, this will become a dictatorship, Barboza told the Associated Press. Its control of all the powers, lack of separation of powers, unscrupulous use of state resources, persecution of adversaries. He was right. In the United States, we view term limits as a good government reform. Right? We believe it empowers citizens relative to public officials. To view term limits so casually is a luxury of our stable democracy. But in other parts of the world, instability and authoritarian ideologies raised the stakes for such reforms. In shaky democracies like Venezuela, term limits were one of the last safeguards against tyranny. Now today, Venezuela is no longer a democracy. But democracy wasn’t overturned with this fraudulent 2024 election. Venezuela’s fate was sealed in that 2009 vote.
S?: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: The Democratic Party held their national convention in Chicago in August, where they officially nominated Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate. Throughout the week, Democratic politicians took to the podium to establish campaign themes and to attack Harris’s Republican challenger. Term limits did not emerge as an issue during the convention. But this short remark from former President Bill Clinton came close. We’ll take it.
Bill Clinton: And then he did something that’s really hard for a condition to do, he voluntarily gave up political power. And George Washington knew that, and he did it, and he set the standard for us serving two terms before it was mandatory. It helped his legacy. And it will enhance Joe Biden’s legacy.
Philip Blumel: Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., who represented Northern New Jersey in the US Congress, passed away last week. Representative Pascrell ran for Congress for the first time in 1996 and spent 30 years in Congress. He was running for his 15th term when he died. Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. Was 87 years old. Pascrell was a career politician who served in the New Jersey legislature since the late 80s, became the mayor of Paterson, and then resigned in order to take his congressional seat. As is so often the case, his first race for his congressional seat was the only competitive one. After winning by a small margin in 1996, he never again faced any serious electoral competition. As an incumbent, he would win every two years against token opposition with wide margins of victory, 68%, 73%. In other words, Representative Pascrell was the type of politician that our entrenched Congress encourages to run for Congress, who is incentivized to play the political game, and for which he’s offered automatic re-election to office, forever. As a result, dying in office is becoming more common. Pascrell is the 11th member of Congress to die in office since 2020.
Philip Blumel: Others include 30-year veteran California Senator Dianne Feinstein. She was 90-years-old. 49-year veteran Alaska Representative Don Young, who died in 2022 at age 88, and Georgia Representative John Lewis, who died in 2020 at age 80. Representative Lewis was a 33-year veteran of the US House. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, when she was running for president, would point to Congress, which she described as the most privileged nursing home in the US. She’s right, of course. The question is, why? Is it because the voters prefer it this way? Or, is it in spite of voter’s preferences? You know the answer. It’s because the system is so rigged in favor of incumbent politicians who play the game that there’s no serious electoral opposition. Please keep in mind that the most aged of the two Houses of Congress, the Senate, enjoyed a 100% re-election rate of incumbents in 2022. I must say that in every episode. But, I mean, think about that. One hundred percent re-election rate of incumbents in the entire US Senate. Since then, some have died, and there’s more on the way. Now, I’m not telling this story to disparage Representative Pascrell. I know he has family and friends grieving right now, and his election campaign, much of it spent in hospitals, unfortunately, is now ended.
Philip Blumel: I will even point out that in his first term of office, Representative Bill Pascrell even voted yes on a term limits constitutional amendment bill. Oh, yes. The point I’m making here is a larger one. We have an electoral system that dishonors older Americans like Pascrell and Dianne Feinstein by propping them up and humiliating them as they slide ignominiously into the night. Nearly all other professions have mechanisms in place to prevent this from occurring and to protect both, our aged citizens and the public from their professional incapacity. Now, Congress has no such mechanism, and it won’t until we adopt term limits on the US Congress.
Philip Blumel: Next. Just for fun, I want to introduce you to an informative and humorous little book called Forgotten Founder and Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin, written by Bill Kauffman. This came out about a decade ago, I guess. Anyway, Luther Martin was a Representative of Maryland at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and an example, an exasperating one to many, of the so-called Anti-Federalists who feared the new Constitution would centralize new and nearly unlimited national powers. So, to protect American liberties, these antis clamored for, amongst other things, a Bill of Rights and term limits. They got the former, but not the latter.
Philip Blumel: In the debates over term limits, Virginia and George Mason, often called the father of the Bill of Rights, point out that, quote, “Nothing is so essential to the preservation of a Republican government as a periodical rotation.” Martin argued vociferously, as apparently the only way he knew how, that the entrenched politician, quote, “Will take his family to the place where the government shall be fixed. That will become his new home, and there is every reason to expect that his future views and prospects will center in the favors and emoluments of the general government.” It’s in lines like these that Luther earned the title Prophet in the book’s title. But not only Anti-Federalists feared an entrenched incumbency. Federalist G. Livingston of New York imagined the elite life of political lifers like this. In this Eden, they will reside with their families, distant from the observation of the people. In such a situation, men are apt to forget their dependents, lose their sympathy, and contract selfish habits. The senators will associate only with men of their own class and thus become strangers to the condition of the common man. They should not only return and be obliged to live with the people, but return to their former rank of citizenship, both to revive their sense of dependents and to gain a knowledge of the country.
Philip Blumel: Well, the Anti-Federalists, like Luther Martin, are labeled by history as the losers in the constitutional battle. But their many contributions to the Constitution, tributes to their obstinacy and adherence to principle, greatly improved the document and helped it preserve rather than threaten liberty. Certainly, time has proven the anti is correct on term limits. However, to be fair, it took quite a while for their dark predictions to materialize, as rotation office was so much part of the revolutionary small r republican creed that it wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that the professional politician became the norm in the Congress and in legislatures across the country. Many of the delegates of the 1787 Constitutional Convention who supported rotation in office, but felt that mandated term limits were unnecessary, they never dreamed of Congress members holding their seats for decades. But the Anti-Federalists did, and they slept fitfully upon leaving Philadelphia.
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Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. The term limits convention bills are moving through the state legislatures, this could be a break-through year for the term limits movement. To check on the status of the term limits convention resolution in your state, go to termlimits.com/takeaction. There, you will see if it has been introduced and where it stands in the committee process on its way to the floor vote. If there’s action to take, you’ll see a take action button by your state. Click it. This will give you the opportunity to send a message to the most relevant legislators urging them to support the legislation. They have to know you’re watching. That’s termlimits.com/takeaction. If your state has already passed the term limits convention resolution, or the bill’s not been introduced in your state, you can still help. Please consider making a contribution to US Term Limits. It is our aim to hit the reset button on the US Congress, and you can help. Go to termlimits.com/donate. Termlimits.com/donate. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
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