Philip Blumel: Mississippi Freakout, and some other action from the front lines. Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement for the week of August 26, 2019.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: Since the historic appearance of our own Nick Tomboulides before the U.S. Senate in June we’ve been focusing mostly on the progress being made in Washington, D.C., and of course that’s important, but if we’re going to succeed in imposing term limits on the U.S. Congress the real action is in our state capitals.
Philip Blumel: And we saw some this week. The man himself, Nick, will fill us in. Hey, Nick.
Philip Blumel: How you doing Nick?
Nick Tomboulides: I’m doing astoundingly well.
Philip Blumel: Hey, before we get down to the news, let’s lay out some context first to explain why this news is important. It occurs to me that not everybody who listens to this podcast has been …. always listened to this podcast, i know we’ve had a lot of new listeners since you made that your appearance before the U.S. Senate. Let’s talk a little bit about, when we give state news, what’s so important about the states if we’re trying to pass term limits on the U.S. Congress?
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah, it’s ironic. I was invited out to the U.S. Senate to talk about passing a term limits amendment through the Congress, so that’s what I talked about, but that’s actually not the centerpiece of what we do here at U.S. Term Limits and a lot of folks might not be aware of it.
Nick Tomboulides: There’s a question I get from our readers, our listeners, many times a day, every day. How are you going to get term limits if Congress has to vote for it?
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: Last night I actually got a tweet, it said, “These blood-sucking political hacks in Congress are never going to install term limits against themselves.” Some variation of that, all the time, and it’s accompanied by doubt. Sometimes it’s used as a reason not to get involved, as in, “Why would I waste my time on this if Congress is never going to pass it?”
Philip Blumel: It is a very valuable question though, it’s one that pops in everyone’s minds when they first start getting involved with this movement.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. But here’s the good news, here’s the great news. We don’t need a vote in Congress to pass term limits on Congress. I’ll repeat. We do not need a vote in Congress to pass term limits on Congress. We can get it done through the states, and nobody in Washington D.C. can stop us.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: That is the entire strategy of U.S. Term Limits.
Philip Blumel: That’s right. Most changes to the U. S. Constitution, in fact all of them so far, all of the amendments have done … been done through the process by which the Congress, two-thirds of the Congress, votes to approve a proposal that is then sent down to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. And naturally, we’re … have the table set to do that also, but we really had the same question everybody else has. How are we going to convince these Congressman to do it to themselves?
Philip Blumel: So the second route is the one that you’re talking about, where you go through the states. Why don’t you explain how that works?
Nick Tomboulides.: Yeah. So the founding fathers in their infinite wisdom knew there would come a time when you need to make changes to the government, to the constitution, but Congress would refuse to do the right thing. So they included an option in the constitution where 34 state legislatures can bypass Congress and pass constitutional amendments on their own, it’s called the Article V convention. It’s tailor-made for a cause like ours, and it’s exactly what we advocate for day in, day out.
Nick Tomboulides: It works by going into each state legislature and asking the State House and the state Senate to pass a very simple resolution saying we want a convention to propose an amendment for congressional term limits.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: And you just need 34 states to sign off on that, and once you get it you are off to the races. All the states will meet in a gathering, in a task force, they will contemplate, consider a debate and draft a term limits amendment for Congress, decide what they think the appropriate number of terms are. Then they will propose the amendment officially, and it will come back, not to Congress, but to the state legislatures where you need 38 of them to ratify it or basically certify it into the constitution.
Nick Tomboulides: So when people tell you they’re worried that Congress is never going to pass term limits, let not your heart be troubled. We don’t need Congress to get this done, and that is the really beautiful thing about this effort.
Philip Blumel: And we have a real reason to believe that we can be successful in doing this, because we started, a short time ago, we have three states already that have officially called for a convention under the Article V of the constitution limited to the subject of congressional term limits, and we are going to be working on a handful of new states in this coming legislative sessions in the new year. And there are a dozen other states that have called for a convention under Article V on multiple subjects that also include term limits, so there is an awful lot of action going on at the states right now calling for term limits, and so it’s happening.
Nick Tomboulides: Now granted, the state legislators who would need to vote for this, they’re not always open to it. They’re certainly far more open to it than members of Congress, but many state legislators are also stubborn. They are politicians, they’re not just going to hand us what we want because we, asked very nicely and smiled at them. That’s why we need our grassroots army of supporters pressuring these guys and gals every day.
Philip Blumel: That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides: We’ve passed it in Alabama, Florida, and Missouri, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do. We’ve got a lot of big target states coming up in the next year or so, including Arizona.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Scott Tillman: Hello. This is Scott Tillman, the National Field Director with U.S. Term Limits. We ask state legislators and candidates for state legislature to sign a pledge to help us put term limits on Congress. The pledge reads, “I pledge that as a member of the state legislature, I will co-sponsor, vote for, and defend the resolution applying for an Article V convention for the sole purpose of enacting term limits on Congress.”
Scott Tillman: Louisiana is one of a few states that have odd year elections. This week, 19 candidates from Louisiana signed our pledge to help support term limits on Congress. We now have 42 candidates in Louisiana who have pledged to support the resolution to term limit Congress.
Scott Tillman: Please ask your legislators to sign the pledge. Pledges are available at termlimits.com.
Philip Blumel: Let’s talk about the Mississippi Freakout. Because one of the states we’re taking some action in a over the last several weeks has been Mississippi, which is a place where we don’t actually have the legislation introduced in the legislature yet, but we’re laying the groundwork for going into that legislature with the Article V Term Limits Convention bill, and we’ve seen some action on that this week.
Nick T Tomboulides: Yes. Politicians, can’t live with them, and that’s the end of the sentence.
Philip Blumel: That’s right.
Nick Tomboulides: In Mississippi, we are working on passing the Term Limits Convention. This is a rare state. It’s got first of all, odd-year elections, so you vote for your state rep, your state Senator, in 2019 as opposed to 2020 when the rest of us will be voting. It’s also a state with a very entrenched political establishment that is very resistant to change. So they had a primary election August 6th, now they have a primary runoff August 27th where the folks who did not get over 50% of the vote on August 6th advance to this runoff in their respective party primary.
Nick T Tomboulides U.S. Term Limits has gotten active. We’ve run mailers, we’ve run digital ads in eight districts where we have someone who has signed the U.S. Term Limits Pledge to vote for the convention running against another person who has refused to sign the pledge, and the mailers that we’ve done say “Diapers and politicians should be changed often and for the same reason.” It’s a great quote from Mark Twain who wrote, as you know, “Life on the Mississippi”, so there’s sort of connection there.
Nick Tomboulides: Anyway, what’s funny is the way the anti-term limit politicians are reacting to this. They and their spouses have taken to Facebook and posted angry rants about U.S. Term Limits, they have gone crazy. They are losing their minds, because their worst fear was that voters would find out they oppose term limits, and now that is happening as a result of our effort. As they say, if you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat. They are feeling it, and they are squirming in Mississippi.
Philip Blumel: And you can feel a lot of heat in a primary election, particularly a runoff, that’s a very sensitive time for a politician. It’s generally low turnout, and there’s a lot of intense interest from those who are voting.
Philip Blumel: The mass of the voters are for term limits. So when they find out right before an election that, hey, their guy that they thought was a good guy does not support term limits, in fact he would not take a pledge to support term limits where their opponent did, that’s going to get him upset.
Nick Tomboulides: This is a Facebook post from the wife of one of the incumbents in the Mississippi State House who refused to sign the U.S. Term Limits Pledge. She said, “My husband must be a pretty big deal if someone thinks he’s powerful enough that they think they have to send out lies in an ad in the mail to keep him from going back.” There’s no lie.
Philip Blumel: Lies?
Nick Tomboulides: He refused to sign the pledge.
Nick Tomboulides: “It’s one thing to lose an election over a belief you truly hold, but to potentially lose over something that is a complete and total lie is just sad. Please share this. He supports term limits, the mail and the ad are lies.”
Nick Tomboulides: Well, if he supports term limits, why did he not sign the Term Limits Pledge we sent him?
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: We didn’t just send it to him, by the way we followed up, we had conversations with him. He … This state rep, Roun McNeal, would just not sign the pledge.
Philip Blumel: Yeah.
Nick Tomboulides: His opponent signed the pledge.
Philip Blumel: Yeah. We’ve been-
Nick Tomboulides: And we decided to educate voters on that.
Philip Blumel: We’ve been in this game long enough to know that when politicians, they always want to seem like they support term limits because they know 80% of their audiences or more support this, so they need to sort of walk a tight rope here. We know full well if they will not sign a pledge or do something in support prior to an election, that after the election they are hopeless.
Philip Blumel: And so, we said they didn’t sign a pledge, or they didn’t sign a pledge, we thanked them for signing the pledge when they did sign a pledge. That’s all the messages say, and it can’t be any more straightforward and honest than that. So I know somebody’s lying, but it’s not us.
Nick Tomboulides: She added, “Raise your hand if you believe someone somewhere will print a retraction. I am now on a mission. I’ve been watching old episodes of Mannix, I think I could be a private investigator.”
Philip Blumel: Mannix?
Nick Tomboulides: “Seriously though, i just want to find out who was behind this and why they chose to say my husband didn’t support term limits.” Okay. If you want to know who’s behind it, just look at the mailer. It says, “Paid for by U.S. Term Limits”. We’re-
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: We’re proudly behind this, because we want to expose your husband’s terrible record. So come look for us if you need to know who’s behind this.
Speaker 5: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: Florida governor Rick Scott ran for the U.S. Senate on term limits, and once arriving there signed-on as a co-sponsor of the U.S. Term Limits amendment bill. Interviewed by WESH Channel 2 in Orlando in July, senator Scott reiterated his support for the reform.
Speaker 6: Senator Scott, let’s talk about your time in D.C. You’ve been there for a couple of months now, and we’ve heard you say Washington is broken, so what-
Rick Scott: It’s pretty broken.
Speaker 6: Okay, so you’ve answered that first question, that’s still your opinion. What progress have you made toward fixing that?
Rick Scott: So what I … Here’s what I think ought to happen, all right? I think we need to have term limits. We have term limits in Florida, most governors have term limits, the president has term limits. I think Congress ought to have term limits.
Philip Blumel: According to a 2015 study by the National Council of State Legislature’s, the percentage of women in term limit legislatures is higher than the national average, while the percentage of female legislators in non-term limit legislatures trails the national average. But one outlier is Louisiana, a term limit state with an unusually low percentage of women in office. But because of the plenitude of open seats created by term limits, Louisiana voters have the power to alter the makeup of their legislature if they wish.
Philip Blumel: A July 21st article in the American Press is titled “More Women Seek Legislative Positions”, and the article notes that the way they’re doing it is not by waiting a generation for old legislators to retire or die, but by taking action now, the old fashioned way, by participating in competitive elections made possible by term limits. Here’s some excerpts from the article with commentary from our own Stacey Selleck.
Stacey Selleck: Women are expected to play a larger role in the next Louisiana legislature. Change is expected because term limits are opening up 47 of the 144 seats, and at least 20 new women and 23 female incumbents have already announced their candidacies. The Advocate reported that the legislature has never had more than 25 women lawmakers. Now there are 18 women in the house, and five in the Senate, or only 15.9% of the total seats. The national average is 29%.
Stacey Selleck: Melanie Oubre, leader of Emerge Louisiana, said, “It’s a start. We have been laser focused on this fall, this is an opportunity to get women to the table.” She said her organization is part of the national effort to recruit and train women to run for elective office as Democrats.
Stacey Selleck: State Senator Sharon Hewitt, a Republican from Slidell, has been reaching out to Republican women to run. Camille Conaway of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, is also recruiting women. Her organization has held seven boot camps around the state. Hewitt said, “We don’t come anywhere near being representative of the demographics of our state, but we can build our bench strength.”
Stacey Selleck: A 2019 Rutgers University study showed 2,131 women, or 28.9%, of the 7,383 state legislators in the United States are women. Wow, 7,383 state legislators. Talk about having a bench of experience just chomping at the bit to get into Congress once term limits are passed at the federal level. Nationally, women lean toward the democratic party platforms, but Hewitt said, “That doesn’t hold true in Louisiana, where several women legislators are among its most conservative members. We look forward to seeing more women in the state legislature. October 12th, 2019 is the primary in Louisiana, and November 16th, 2019 is the general election.
Stacey Selleck: Why not ask candidates in your area to sign the Term Limits on Congress Pledge, at termlimits.com/pledge.
Philip Blumel: In Arizona, the Article V Term Limits Convention bill passed the House twice.
Nick Tomboulides: Yes.
Philip Blumel: And then got stalled out in the Senate. So we have some action on the Senate side that we want to report on. Nick.
Nick Tomboulides: Yeah. Let me just say, first of all, I love Arizona because they have In-N-Out Burger out there, it’s my favorite restaurant.
Philip Blumel: I know it is.
Nick Tomboulides: You get a Double Double, Animal Style, fries. They’re not East of Texas. I live in Florida, so right now I’m deprived. I’m hoping I can go out to Arizona to get myself a nice, Double Double.
Nick Tomboulides: But coming back to term limits. Arizona over the last couple of years has been the tail of the “Fickle Farnsworth’s”. Two senators, David and Eddie Farnsworth, no relation to one another. They’re just bad listeners, they think it’s okay to thumb their noses at the voters who want term limits. Here’s the good news. David is term-limited out of the Senate, Eddie announced he is retiring, both Farnsworth’s are getting the old heave-ho and Arizona will soon be a very different ballgame.
Philip Blumel: So both of these Farnsworth’s opposed the bill that stalled out in the Senate.
Nick Tomboulides: Yes, they did, but they don’t universally oppose convention bills. There was a time when David Farnsworth was convinced to vote for another one under a lot of pressures. That’s why I said, they’re very fickle, they don’t have one consistent principle that they adhere to.
Philip Blumel: But this is particularly important of course, because Eddie Farnsworth was basically the most veteran and one of the most powerful senators in the Arizona Senate. He was the Senate president pro tempore, and so losing an obstacle like him will make our chances far better in the next session, and I believe that Arizona will be one of our target states next year.
Nick Tomboulides: Yes, absolutely. It shifts the dynamics, it moves our whip count into a net-positive position, hopefully, where we have more senators likely to vote yes for the Term Limits Convention than vote no.
Nick Tomboulides: And here’s the really good news, the front runner to replace David Farnsworth is a longtime friend and ally of U.S. Term Limits named Kelly Townsend. Kelly sponsored the Term Limits Convention in the State House, she got it passed through the State House, she has been a superhero on this. She’s been involved in national efforts to plan the convention, she’s got experience with the balanced budget amendment as well. She’s totally on our side, and she is the person with the inside track to win that Senate seat. So the situation’s changing positively and dynamically very quickly in Arizona.
Philip Blumel: Excellent. Well, moving back to the national scene, as everyone knows who listens to this podcast, we’ve been talking about the presidential contest on the democratic side and about everyone’s positions on term limits, and we keep getting new candidates running that take a solid position on the subject.
Philip Blumel: However, we just lost one this last week, Seth Moulton. He was important because he was sort of behind the little civil war within the Democrats, the young Democrats, coming into this new session when there was a battle over who would be the new House Speaker. Was it going to revert back to Speaker Pelosi? And of course it did, but not after they got some concessions, and one of those concessions was about term limiting herself. And one of the concessions that the young rebels were asking for was adding term limits to committee chairs in the Democratic Caucus, very exciting, and Seth was a ringleader in that effort.
Philip Blumel: Here’s a clip of Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton talking about term limits.
Seth Moulton: Term limits for members of Congress is a very controversial idea, but at the end of the day I think it would probably make Congress better. Because if you went to Congress knowing that you had a certain period of time to get things done and to do the right thing for the country, and that was going to be your legacy, not just how many times you could get re-elected, then maybe you would make better decisions.
Seth Moulton: There’s this sort of perception we have about presidents, which is that they always do their best work in their second term, because they’re not worried about getting reelected they’re just trying to do the right thing for the country. Well, maybe if we had term limits on Congress that would help as well.
Nick Tomboulides: Well, maybe now that he’s left the presidential contest, he can get back to Congress and focus on forcing the leadership in the democratic party to uphold their promise on term limits, maybe he can focus on getting co-sponsors for congressional term limits on the democratic side of the aisle. He’s got all sorts of ways he can be productive when he goes back to Washington.
Nick Tomboulides: I think that this whole idea of getting people to talk about term limits in the debates is … it’s kind of counterintuitive. It’s almost rigged in a way, because the candidates most likely to support term limits are the newer ones, the ones with less name recognition who haven’t been in politics as long, and it’s tough for them to get into the debate because they don’t have the name recognition to get onto the stage and make their case to the American people.
Nick Tomboulides: So the debates tend to be nominated by more of the careerist-types who happened to be household names, but those folks are not likely to be term limits supporters.
Philip Blumel: Right.
Nick Tomboulides: It’s a tough little catch-22 that we’re dealing with, but we’ll see in the future who might have the opportunity to bring this up. I’m betting on Tom Steyer.
Philip Blumel: I got my fingers crossed.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us again this week. As we discussed in the last episode, we created a new tool for you to send an email to all of the announced presidential candidates urging them to come out for congressional term limits, and for the Democrats, to bring up the issue in the upcoming presidential debate. They need to hear from us.
Philip Blumel: Go to term limits.com and under the action tab, choose “Contact POTUS Candidates”. Please share a link to this with all of your friends.
Philip Blumel: Thank you, we’ll be back next week.
Speaker 2: The revolution isn’t being televised. Fortunately, you have the No Uncertain Terms Podcast.
Speaker 11: USTL.