by David Brown
Tim Jacob has been here before.
Just as, today, the chairman of Arkansas Term Limits is a leader in the effort to preserve state legislative term limits, so he led the original charge for state legislative term limits in the early 1990s.
“I found myself the Petition Chairman for the effort to get the issue on the ballot so the people could decide,” he told a recent meeting of the Southeast Arkansas Tea Party. His comments were reported in the Advance-Monticellonian. “In an all-volunteer effort, with no outside help, we were able to get enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. In November of [1992], a half million Arkansas voters said ‘yes’ to term limits with 60% of the vote. Bill Clinton was running that year and only got 53% of that same vote.
“Our elected officials should defend the Constitution and represent their constituents. But after the election results established term limits, the legislators went to court to challenge the vote saying that the voters did not know what they were doing. The Arkansas Supreme Court voted 7-0 to keep the term limits as the people had voted.”
If that all sounds pretty definitive to you, you’re probably not a career politician burdened by a liege-lord sense of entitlement about your seat of power and contempt for popular curbs on that power.
Not every officeholder harbors such contempt. But the fact that so many have proved willing to lie and cheat in hopes of tricking people into gutting state legislative term limits only bolsters the case for ejecting them from power right on schedule.
The measure that Arkansas lawmakers referred to the November ballot represents at least three overlapping lies.
The first lie is that the misleadingly entitled measure (“The Arkansas Elected Officials Ethics, Transparency, and Financial Reform Act of 2014”) is primarily about modest “ethics” reforms, not about weakening term limits. We agree with Tim’s brother, Paul Jacob, that a more accurate (and transparent) title would be “The Anti-Term Limits Measure of 2014” (bit.ly/P0yT7c).
The second lie is that the measure’s term limits provisions aim primarily to reduce “combined” maximum tenure in house+senate from 14 years to 12 years, not primarily to double (or more than double) the lawmaker’s maximum permitted tenure in a particular seat from six years or eight years to a whopping 16 years. Given the often overwhelming advantages of incumbency—from franking privileges to name familiarity to gerrymandered districts to the power to dole out special favors to big-pocketed interests—incumbents know that running for reelection to one’s current seat is typically the path of least resistance.
The third lie is that many Yes-voting Arkansas lawmakers were as blindsided by the content of the ballot measure they passed as anybody else. This protestation may be true of a few harried lawmakers (though we’re skeptical). But the fact that the measure has not been yanked from the ballot in light of its now all-too-obvious purpose shows that the number of such honestly repentant legislators cannot be even a plurality, let alone a majority. Lawmakers have had months to realize their errors of their ways and reverse themselves.
“Legislators should have conviction and honor,” Tim Jacob says. “The legislature is setting out to fool the people of Arkansas. They should put the words ‘term limits’ in the title; but because the voters have twice voted to keep term limits as they currently are, the legislators are afraid that if it is clearly stated on the ballot, it will fail again.”
Jacob has been here before. He not only fought for the original term limits law that was passed in 1992, he also entered the fray in 2004, the first time the state’s lawmakers tried to fool voters into gutting term limits.
“The title of the bill on the ballot that time stated that it would ‘enact term limits,’ ” he recalls. “The voters had the choice to double the term limits or to keep the term limits already on the books.” By a 70% majority, they voted not to lengthen term limits. “Our voters did not say or shout ‘term limits,’ they roared ‘term limits.’ ”
David Brown is the Editor of No Uncertain Terms, the U.S. Term Limits Monthly Newsletter.