INTRO MUSIC : “Maybe One Time” by Jim Skafish
Philip Blumel: The sun rose in the east this morning and a new poll shows that 79% of Americans support congressional term limits.
Philip Blumel: Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of August 5th, 2019.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: But this new poll isn’t just like all the others. It’s what the pollster asked next that’s making the waves. US Term Limits executive director, Nick Tomboulides, has the details. Hey Nick.
Nick Tomboulides: Phil, how are you?
Philip Blumel: All right, well, I’m looking at the results of a new poll from McLaughlin and Associates, just came out last week and it looks like, on the surface, the same old thing. 79% of American citizens support congressional term limits and that’s every breakdown you can imagine. That’s people in the east, Midwest, south, west, approve of Trump, disapprove of Trump, republican, democrat, independent, liberal, conservative, college degree, no college degree. Every category overwhelmingly for congressional term limits. Well, we’ve seen this before. What’s special about this poll?
Nick Tomboulides: Well, what’s special about this poll is, this is the first time we’ve seen a pollster actually ask the respondents, “What is your preferred term limit for members of the House of Representatives?” Open-ended question. When I meet with politicians, they always tell me term limits of six to eight years, which USTL recommends too. Sure, it’s radical, it’s draconian.
Philip Blumel: I’ve heard that.
Nick Tomboulides: What we really need are 12-year term limits or, or none is what the political class says. Well, based on these results, we can now prove that these politicians are out of touch with the people they’re supposed to serve. Because according to this poll, 85% of people believe that term limits for the US House should be eight years or fewer.
Philip Blumel: Or less.
Nick Tomboulides: About half of them, about half, believe in only letting House members do two terms, right?
Philip Blumel: Four years.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. What we recommend at USTL is six, which is sort of right in the sweet spot, but according to this poll, six year term limits might be too generous.
Philip Blumel: Wow. All right. Let me get this straight because I don’t want to get confused of all these numbers.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah.
Philip Blumel: The term limit that is in the bills in Congress that we’re supporting are three terms or six years, and the politicians generally counter with, that there should be six terms or 12 years, right? 3% of Americans believe, with the politicians, that the proper term limit is six terms or 12 years. That is unbelievable. And now what you’re telling me is that the 85% of Americans say it should be either four, three, two or one term meaning eight years or less.
Nick Tomboulides: Correct. Yes.
Philip Blumel: Wow. I’m surprised by this and you know, we see so many polls and I’m fairly surprised. This is surprising to me because we’re recommending a three term, six year term limit for the House of Representatives and the American people are actually calling for a stricter term limit than US Term Limits. I’m a little ashamed.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. Kind of makes six years look a little lame, right.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: Well, it’s really fascinating because what it proves to me is that when these politicians brainstorm and decide they’re going to make term limits a part of their campaign … Look at those who are running for president on the democratic side, every single one of them is recommending a term limit of 12 years or longer. There’s not a single candidate on the democrat side who said term limits in the House need to be shorter than 12 years.
Nick Tomboulides: What we know from this poll is, they didn’t develop that opinion by talking to the American people, because if they had consulted their voters, according to this poll, 84% of democrats believed term limits should be four terms or fewer. If they’d consulted with the people, consulted with the voters, they would be proposing something a lot shorter, a lot more reasonable than 12 years. 12 years is a concoction of the political class. It’s what’s been cooked up in smoke-filled rooms in Washington, DC as a way to mollify the term limits movement rather than proposing something serious that would have a real impact.
Speaker 2: I’ll tell you what, we have made the argument on these podcasts over and over again why shorter limits are better, and usually we’re arguing six versus 12. The peoples’ limit, which we consider to be six versus 12 years, it is so clear that the Americans are in our corner and then some.
Nick Tomboulides: Another thing I’d like to add, just looking at the demographic data in this poll, one thing we’ve highlighted on this podcast before is that women are more likely to run for office when there are term limits because they see their career paths as less linear. They don’t want to become career politicians. What’s interesting about this poll is, women actually prefer shorter term limits, even more than men do.
Nick Tomboulides: 74% of women who were polled favor a term limit of six years or fewer versus just 60% of men who think the term limit should be six years or fewer. And women overall across the board, supported much shorter term limits than men did. 9% of women believe there should only be a one-term limit for Congress, no reelection at all, versus 5% of men who believe that. So these really are stunning results across the board. Let’s hope people are paying attention.
Speaker 4: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: Bait and switch is a classic ploy for both swindlers and politicians. The politicians know that the people want congressional term limits and they also know that the people are right. So the politician nods and smiles, makes the case for term limits blandly and then rolls out a plan for outrageously long term limits that defeat the whole purpose of the reform. Around the office, we call these Nixonian term limits after Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States. Here’s the former president in 1991 showing how bait and switch is performed by a seasoned pro.
Speaker 5: Would you limit the terms of Senate and House?
Richard Nixon: I would. The founders expected, and it proved that this did not work out in practice, that the people would not serve in Congress over extended periods of time, that there would be turnover. And I think it would be healthy in today’s world in which events change so much, to bring in new generations of leaders. And so in this incidence with the presidency limited to eight years, the House certainly should be limited to 12 years. The Senate maybe to 18 years at the very most. But I don’t see the Congress ever passing it, because they they have a vested interest in the status quo.
Scott Tillman: Hi, this is Scott Tillman, the national field director with US Term Limits. On June 17th, Nick Tomboulides testified about congressional term limits in Washington, DC. Both democrats and republicans are co-sponsoring this legislation. SJR1, in the Senate, was introduced by Ted Cruz and HJR20 in the House, was introduced by Representative Francis Rooney. We now have 63 members of Congress co-sponsoring and sponsoring the resolution for a term limits amendment.
Scott Tillman: Please contact your representative and ask them to sign our pledge and to co-sponsor HGR20 and please contact your senator and ask them to sign our pledge and co-sponsor SJR1. Pledges are available at TermLimits.com.
Nick Tomboulides: In related news on Capitol Hill, yesterday the Senate passed a bill to increase the spending caps, suspend the federal debt limit for two years. This was a deal that was struck between President Trump and the democratic leaders, and what this would do is add an additional $324 billion to the national debt, suspend the debt ceiling until July, 2021 and it passed by a vote of 67 to 28 in the US Senate with support from leadership in the democratic and republican parties.
Nick Tomboulides: What was interesting about this from a term limits perspective is that there was a significant variance between how the senior republicans voted on this, those who had been in the Senate and been in Washington the longest versus how the newer members voted. It was like night and day. I ran the numbers yesterday. What we found was among the republicans, senators who’d been in Washington 25 years or longer, 100% of those people voted to bust the caps and add $320 billion in new debt.
Philip Blumel: Wow.
Nick Tomboulides: Among those who’ve been in Washington 15 years or more, 90% of them voted to bust the caps, but among the republicans who’d been in Washington fewer than 15 years, only 32 voted to bust the caps. So what we’re seeing is, you know, democrats run for Congress and they’re very open and transparent about the fact that they want a more robust federal government. They would like more spending, more transfer programs. That’s fine. Republicans run with philosophical differences. They say they want to be fiscal hawks. They want to reduce the debt, reduce the deficit.
Nick Tomboulides: What we’re seeing is, for republicans who’ve been in Washington 25 years or more, for 15 years or more, that’s all rhetoric. That’s all talk, no action. Only the republican senators who’ve been in Congress for a short time actually held to their fiscally responsible principles and values.
Philip Blumel: That’s interesting. And also, there’s a classic study done on this subject, again, looking at republicans because they run on a fiscal conservative platform. It was a study done by the Cato Institute in which they looked at the voting records on all these key spending issues among republicans, and they saw that exact phenomena. That those that had been in office less than six years, which is, of course, our recommended term limit, voted for say, cuts against increases, pay increases and other things, and those that have been there longer voted for more spending. And obviously nothing has changed over this period.
Nick Tomboulides: No, it’s really amazing, because whether you’re a senior republican or a freshman republican, they all run on the platform of cutting waste, reducing federal spending, getting debt and deficits in line. I mean, Mitch McConnell runs for reelection on that platform, and yet when the deficit bill comes down the pike, that would add $320 billion, billion with a B to the national debt, it gets rubber stamped by the career politicians.
Nick Tomboulides: It’s not surprising to those of us who follow term limits, but it is interesting to look at this divergence in voting patterns between those who have been in Washington become complacent as opposed to those who are still connected to their constituents.
Philip Blumel: Alan Johnson, Jr. is co-founder and chairman of TermLimitPledge.org and serves on his board along with director, Steven Bosh and veteran political consultant, Dane Waters. Their website describes them as a nonprofit, nonpartisan congressional reform effort. The group emerged this year reviving an old strategy to obtain term limits, but giving it a modern technological twist. We spoke to Johnson at his home base in Seattle last week.
Philip Blumel: Hey Alan, thanks for joining us.
Allen Johnson, Jr: Hey, Phil.
Philip Blumel: So I am excited about what I’m hearing about this new organization TermLimitPledge.Org. I want to talk to you a bit about it for our listeners. And I also want to be careful not to create any confusion too, because you know US Term Limits, who is the producer of this podcast has pledges also. And so just to set the table here, you know Alan, that we have a pledge that we give to Congress members asking them that, if they are elected, they agree to co-sponsor and vote the term limits amendment to the Constitution. And then we have one that we bring to state legislators and we ask them that, if they’re elected, that they’ll co-sponsor and vote for the term limits convention bills in the state legislatures. But you have a pledge. What exactly is it and how does it differ from what we at US Term Limits are doing?
Allen Johnson, Jr: Yes. This is our biggest challenge, Phil. Our pledge is, we only go to the voters. We do not go to the candidates or to the incumbents.
Philip Blumel: Okay.
Allen Johnson, Jr: The concept is that the voter sends a pledge to his or her candidate and the pledge they send commits the candidate to limiting his or her own term in office, if they’re elected.
Philip Blumel: Okay.
Allen Johnson, Jr: In other words, they agree to serve only, in the House, it would be three terms. In the Senate, it would be two.
Philip Blumel: Okay, so it’s a self-limit pledge?
Allen Johnson, Jr: It’s a self-limiting pledge that the candidate signs, and of course, the motivation for signing the pledge is to get a bump in the election. And we have some really good research that shows the probability of a four to 10% bump when the pledge is signed. When it’s signed, it’s returned to the voter and the voter becomes the voter-sponsor and he or she sends it to us and we put it online and publicize it to whatever extent we can.
Philip Blumel: I see. Okay. So you’re not doing, you’re not really getting involved in any politics, you’re just talking to people and having them, you’re empowering the people is what you’re doing.
Allen Johnson, Jr: We consider the term limit pledge a tool to empower the voter to take direct action in helping to choose the candidate.
Philip Blumel: Okay. And what inspired you to get involved on the term limits movement and then also what led you to this specific strategy?
Allen Johnson, Jr: Well, I’ve believed in term limits all my life, I mean, all my adult life, because it’s in keeping with what the founders intended. And we want citizen politicians that will come to Washington and come under the motivation of serving the people and then go home. It’s kind of a mystery why it hadn’t happened over the last 200 and something years, but it hasn’t.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Allen Johnson, Jr: And it needs to, because we currently have career politicians, 50% of them, by the way, are millionaires and these career politicians almost by definition, are motivated to look after their own interests rather than serve the interests of the people so we want to shift this over to citizen politicians and it just makes sense from the concept of government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Philip Blumel: Right. Well let me ask you this. Last week I was at the Freedom Fest Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we were pitching the idea of having this congressional amendment passed in Congress and bragging about how we had the first Congressional hearing in the last 20 years, last month. And you know, everyone’s for term limits, of course, as you know. But the challenge I always get is, “Well, wait a minute, that’s great idea, but you know, those guys are never going to pass term limits on themselves.” Now we always have to field that question. So I’ll ask you, what makes you think that legislators will agree to term limit themselves?
Allen Johnson, Jr: Well, the leverage is to get elected.
Philip Blumel: Yep.
Allen Johnson, Jr: You know, 90% of the incumbents get returned to office. It’s very hard to unseat an incumbent. If you can get a four to 10% bump in your attempt to unseat an incumbent, that’s pretty big.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Allen Johnson, Jr: That’s a pretty big incentive.
Philip Blumel: Where does that figure come from? That four to 10?
Allen Johnson, Jr: My associate here, Steve Bosh, spent the last 15 years of his life doing market research for major companies such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard and he has developed a method of research that he goes out and talks to people and they don’t even know they’re being interviewed. And he has talked to hundreds of people, so what you get is a really authentic polling information and he’s done that kind of research on this issue and that’s what he comes up with and it’s pretty compelling and is very powerful really.
Philip Blumel: So you guys are online, I know you’re brand new, but your online as of right now, correct?
Allen Johnson, Jr: That’s correct. We are online.
Philip Blumel: TermLimitsPledge.org. You’ve done a really good job with it and I’d urge everybody to check it out and also to tell your legislator, Hey, … or your member of Congress… we want term limits. If we can’t, we’re not getting it up in terms of the amendment, we want you to do it, to yourself.
Allen Johnson, Jr: Yup. Yup. That’s right. And Phil, let me direct your attention to a quote that we have on the website by Mark Twain who said that “Congressmen are like diapers, they should be changed frequently and for the same reason.
Philip Blumel: Yeah, that’s a winner.
Allen Johnson, Jr: Yes sir. And Phil, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity.
Paul Jacob: They’re called term limits. Looking for an exemplar of condescending witlessness? Take Steve Benen, producer of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show. Please. Last week I praised Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, for endorsing term limits. Well Benen panned him at the Maddow blog calling term limits a gimmick. So when Aristotle argued for mandatory rotation in office, that was just a stunt?
Paul Jacob: “I imagine most term limit proponents mean well”, concedes the snooty Benen about congressional term limits whopping 82% public support, but he goes on, “Whether they appreciate the details are not, forcing experienced policymakers out of office, even if their constituents want to reelect them has an unintended consequence. Inexperienced officials inevitably find themselves more dependent on outside groups and lobbyists.” Are we supposed to believe that lobbyist and special interests are being kept at bay by Congress’s current careerists? Supposedly appealing to an underlying principle, Benen then maintains that there is simply no reason for the federal government to impose arbitrary constraints on voters’ ability to choose their own members of Congress. Oh, that’s really rich. As if the federal government is dictatorially cramming term limitation down the throats of poor politician-adoring voters.
Paul Jacob: Benen notes that Steyer is not the only democratic candidate endorsing term limits, acknowledging that Beto O’Rourke has also proposed a reform. Actually, there are eight more democratic presidential candidates who have voiced support. Those candidates are New Jersey senator, Cory Booker, former HUD secretary, Julian Castro, Maryland Congressman John Delaney, New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton and entrepreneur, Andrew Yang. Mr. Benen’s sophistication boils down to the tired slogan, We already have term limits, they’re called elections. That may fly for the insiders at MSNBC and in Congress, but the vote the American people most want, is on a constitutional amendment for congressional term limits. This is common sense. I’m Paul Jacob. For more common sense, go to Thisiscommonsense.Com.
Philip Blumel: You know, I look at government spending as a very loose proxy for the success of lobbyists in the sense that most lobbyists, by far most lobbyists go to Washington to lobby Congress for spending or some special favor from government to benefit some special interest that hires them. Right, it goes without saying. And so the more that the government spends really shows that lobbyists are being very successful in persuading them to spend. Right. Of course there’s exceptions and of course there’s good and bad spending, et cetera. That’s why I say it’s a loose proxy, but greater government spending is, in some way, a sign of lobbyist success. So when you look at these numbers, these back of the napkin numbers you put together for us here, you can see that in effect too. Those that have been in Congress for a very long time are much more interested in satisfying lobbyists’ interests and requests than those that just arrived.
Nick Tomboulides: It’s absolutely true. Lobbyists always go to politicians asking for more, not less. One metric that has been used in Florida to measure the influence of lobbyists under term limits has been, has the government of Florida grown on a per capita basis over the last, you know, 30 something years since term limits were implemented and it’s been found that it has not. Overall, the states that have imposed term limits have been able to restrain the growth rate of government, which would seem to indicate that they’ve effectively put a check on lobbyists’ influence. Whereas Washington, the spending is just continually cascading out of control every year or every other year. So I think that is a very important indicator and it probably explains why every time term limits are on the ballot anywhere in America, lobbyists do all they can to stop it.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for the 51st episode of the No Uncertain Terms podcast. Next week is our one year anniversary. We appreciate you and other term limits activists sticking with us as we learned how, through trial and error, how to put together a weekly show. We’re in this fight to win, but sometimes we’d like to take a break and have some fun. So please tune in next Monday as we bring you a special anniversary episode, which includes our first ever Scammy Awards.
Philip Blumel: Be seeing you.
Speaker 2: Okay. If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe and leave a review. The No Uncertain Terms podcasts can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, and now Google Play.
Richard Nixon: The Senate, maybe to 18 years, at the very most.
SCREECH
MUSIC CREDITS – Full versions of the music sampled during this podcast may be purchased via iTunes at the following links : “Maybe One Time” by Skafish, “Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits
The “No Uncertain Terms” podcast is produced by Kenn Decter for U.S. Term Limits
Executive Producer Philip Blumel (President, U.S. Term Limits)