Philip Blumel: Another one bites the dust. Hi, I’m Phillip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement for the week of April 4th, 2022.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: There is no profession as rife with corruption as politics. In the most recent evidence of that sad truth, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska announced last month that he was resigning from the US Congress after being convicted of lying to federal authorities about an illegal campaign contribution. US Term Limits Executive Director, Nick Tomboulides is out this week, so I’ll be sharing this story and others from the Term Limits beat.
Philip Blumel: Fortenberry was first elected in 2004 and had reached the levers of power, having served on the mighty House Appropriations Committee. The representative repeatedly refused to sign the US Term Limits pledge to support a Congressional Term Limits Amendment, and he earned an F grade from the rating system at termlimits.com. The charges sprung from Fortenberry denying that he had received $30,000 in donations at a 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles from Gilbert Chagoury. Chagoury is a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire who has been accused of conspiring to make contributions to several American politicians. Foreign citizens cannot legally make contributions to American election campaigns. So Chagoury has had to pay $1.8 million in fines after a deal with the US government.
Philip Blumel: Now, Fortenberry claimed not to have known about the Chagoury connection, as the money was funneled through a henchman of Chagoury’s to a local political fundraiser who made the initial contribution to Fortenberry at the fundraiser. But this story fell through when it was revealed that Representative Fortenberry called up the henchman later asking for more money. Another term limits foe bites the dust.
Scott Tillman: Hello, this is Scott Tillman, the National Field Director with US Term Limits. We ask candidates for Congress to sign a pledge that will help us get a Term Limits Amendment into the US Constitution. The pledge reads, “I pledge that as a member of Congress, I will cosponsor and vote for the US Term Limits Amendment of three house terms and two senate terms, and no longer limit.” 446 candidates have signed this pledge so far in the 2022 cycle. We also ask candidates for the state legislature to sign a pledge to help us get a Term Limits Convention to add a Congressional Term Limits Amendment to the US Constitution. The state legislator candidate pledge reads, ‘I pledge that as a member of the state legislature, I will cosponsor, vote for, and defend the resolution applying for an Article V Convention for the sole purpose of enacting term limits on Congress.”
Scott Tillman: State legislative elections will happen in 45 states this year, and we expect over 10,000 candidates. We need your help to find and contact those candidates. We need volunteers to do research and to make phone calls. Already, we’ve had over 550 new candidates in the ’22 cycle. Sign the pledge. We are making significant progress, and you could help by contacting your senators and representatives and candidates for those seats and asking them to sign the pledge and to cosponsor legislation. For more ways to help search US Term Limits on Facebook, like and follow our national page, as well as the page for your state. Thank you.
Philip Blumel: In other news, term limits is raising its head as an issue in the election for the Illinois 17th Congressional District, in which there are eight different candidates running. And this is a heavily Democratic district, and so a new poll was released that I wanna share with you, that only polled democrats who are gonna be basically making the decision in this election… There were some generic questions to get a feel for this pool of people. For instance, the recipients of the poll were asked whether or not they viewed themselves as progressive or traditional Democrats. In this district, the 17th, Illinois, 47% identified themselves as progressive, and 42% as traditional, with 11 saying they weren’t sure. In this district, 51% strongly approve of the way that President Biden is performing his job, and 36% somewhat approve. Only 13% either disapproved or were not sure. More relevant to listeners of this podcast are the questions I ask next.
Philip Blumel: Do you favor or oppose term limits for members of Congress? And in this district, 49% strongly favor, and 31% somewhat favor. And so in this very partisan Democratic district, we see a result that is very similar to what we’d expect in a very partisan Republican district, and indeed in a mixed purple district. Another interesting question they asked is that whether these Democrats in this district would prefer limits on Congress of three terms, six years, or six terms, 12 years, which is the commonly most preferred term limit of politicians themselves when they can’t avoid term limits altogether. Not surprisingly, only 27% of the respondents decided with the politicians on this one. Another interesting aspect of this poll is that the respondents were asked who they supported in this eight-way race, and 75% were unsure, and of the eight candidates running, no one got more than 10%. The best performer was a gentleman named Eric Sorenson, who got 8% of the theoretical votes of these polled respondents.
Philip Blumel: But, and I think this is probably the most interesting part of this poll, the final question. Suppose you knew that Litesa Wallace signed the US Term Limits pledge and supports term limits, but all the other candidates oppose term limits. If you knew that to be true and the election were held today, for whom would you vote? Then all of a sudden, Litesa Wallace jumps out to a big lead at 27%. There’s a lesson here if these politicians want to learn it.
Aaron Dukette: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: And now, Aaron Dukette with his giant inflatable gator somewhere in Kentucky, promoting the Term Limits Convention Resolution, which is being considered by the Kentucky Legislature.
Aaron Dukette: Hey everybody. This is Aaron Dukette, Central Regional Director with US Term Limits. We are out with our swamp creature, our gator, on our first stop throughout Kentucky. We’re outside of University of Kentucky, put up behind the library out here. We got people coming down either side of the street, and loving it. They’re honking, they’re waving, they’re getting some good laughs, taking a look at our gator, and we’re moving this thing along. Key of all this, guys, the reason we’re going out here is to raise awareness for the fact that we can have congressional term limits, so we don’t have to wait for Congress to do it. We can go out and we can make some noise from the grassroots level up, and so here we are, we’re at the University of Kentucky. We’ll be all over the map, and we’ll be coming to a town near you. And everybody out there needs to call up their state representative and their state senator and tell them to move the US Term Limits Resolution to a vote. It’s House Joint Resolution 17 in the House, and it’s Senate Joint Resolution 24 in the Senate. But you don’t have to worry about that, just tell them “US Term Limits Resolution for term limits on Congress.” Tell you want term limits on Congress, let’s get it done. And if you see us out there, give us a wave, give us a honk. We’ll see you. Alright, bye now.
Philip Blumel: Next, some news from Florida. Just as certain as voters love term limits, politicians can be expected to hate them. And in two recent cases in Florida, we saw that politicians in Palm Beach County and also in Brevard County, both county commissions who have eight-year term limits currently, are discussing the idea, or at least asking experts to discuss the idea on their behalf on whether maybe the term limit should be weakened to 12 years. Coincidentally, I live in Palm Beach County, and US Term Limits Executive Director, Nick Tomboulides lives in Brevard. In Palm Beach County late last year, the commission asked its staff to prepare a briefing on the benefits of weakening the term limits to 12 years, and they complied and they published this simple report. And then looking at it, the commission called for a workshop last week in which they were going to discuss putting together a new referendum to place on the ballot to see if voters had an appetite to weaken the term limits.
Philip Blumel: Now, if you’re familiar with these type of things, county commissions will never come right out and say that they’re for weakening their own term limit, the conflict of interest is too clear. However, there’s ways around that. So what they do is they will have a commission set up or a briefing done by staff or launch a Charter Review Commission or something like that so that they can have other people do the dirty work for them, and they can just review the work of the committee or the staff and then decide that, “Oh yes, I think this is something that we should consider.” Well, that’s the step that was next, that we expected to see at this workshop. And the workshop was supposed to start at 2 PM in the afternoon, and they made us wait till about 5:00, which was frustrating, but the result was very positive. After waiting all this time and the term limits issue came up, it was the last issue of the day, and there were still a lot of people waiting around. It was pretty clear that several people were here to talk about term limits.
Philip Blumel: And whether that was the reason or there was some other, it was not perfectly clear, but one of the commissioners, Melissa McKinley, said that she didn’t really have an appetite to discuss this at this time, and asked for a poll of all the commissioners in order to save everyone some time to see if they really wanted to move forward on this or not, and if not, then why waste her time talking about it? Well, one after another, being put on the spot, every single commissioner said, “No, let’s not.” And I’ll tell you what, I don’t know, I’m not inside these commissioners’ heads, but from my vantage point, it looked like they saw that there were people that cared about this and were already getting fired up even at this early stage and were paying attention. And they decided it would just be better to let it go. A special thanks to Jack Furnari and The Palm Beach County Jolt blog who helped blow the whistle on this. And also for former Palm Beach County Commission candidate, John Maples, who also got the word out.
Philip Blumel: Something similar happened to Nick up in Brevard County recently. There they’re going through a charter review process, and that’s the classic time for politicians to make an attack on term limits. They always ask the Charter Review Commission to look at whether they should weaken their term limits. And Charter Review Commissions almost uniformly give the commissioners what they want and provide some cover for the commissioners to launch a campaign to undo their term limits. Well, unfortunately for them, Nick Tomboulides, who is the Executive Director of US Term Limits, lives in Brevard County. And so when it came up at the Charter Review Commission, and there was a hearing on the subject and some citizen input, Nick was on the case. He came up, made the case for keeping the term limits. He also had an op ed published in Florida Today, which is the largest daily in that area.
Philip Blumel: Similar to the case in Palm Beach County, the commission just gave up, at least for now. Just pulled the idea, it seems that the idea is at least frozen. In both cases, of course, we have to watch very closely and make sure that they just won’t bring up the issue again when there’s no one watching. But nonetheless, I think that again there’s a lesson here, and that is that when these politicians wanna do this, it is so clearly in their interest at the expense of the citizens that they don’t like to do it in the light of day. All you have to do is show up and they will be worried. You get some people, put up a little bit of opposition, and they’ll cave in many, many cases, and so it’s worth your time to do so.
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 breakthrough 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 has 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.
Stacey Selleck: Contact your state lawmakers before they vote on term limits for Congress. Go to termlimits.com/takeaction.
S5: USTL.