Philip Blumel:
Filibuster Redux. After passing the West Virginia Senate in every West Virginia House committee, corrupt state politicians used parliamentary maneuvers to prevent a vote on the term limits convention bill by midnight Saturday, the last day of the 2020 session. The term limits convention bill is dead in West Virginia for another year.
Philip Blumel:
Hi, this is Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the Official Podcast of the Term Limits Movement, for the week of March 9, 2020.
Stacey Selleck:
Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel:
How did this happen? Let’s turn to U.S. Term Limits Executive Director, Nick Tomboulides, for some answers. Nick.
Nick Tomboulides:
Thank you, Phil. I am a nursing a bit of a cold right now, so my voice is a little scratchy and I’m a bit nasally, but I do have an important message. I do want to talk about what happened in West Virginia. The congressional term limits convention bill is dead in the West Virginia legislature. If you recall, this is part of our national strategy. What we need are 34 state legislatures to pass resolutions calling for term limits on Congress, and then the states can go around Washington, D.C. and enact the amendment on their own. Nobody in the swamp can stop them. So we needed the state legislature of West Virginia to pass this. We put in the groundwork, now over several sessions and years, and once more, they let us down.
Nick Tomboulides:
This is a reversal of last year. Last year the state House passed it, and then the state Senate filibustered and ran out the clock. This time the state Senate passed it, but the House ran out the clock and never voted. So it’s back to back years of cowardice, and just asking, how did we get to this point? It bears repeating. You can’t say this enough. Politicians despise term limits. They despise it because in their careers they have struck gold. They have won the Powerball jackpot by getting elected to these positions.
Nick Tomboulides:
Never before had they done anything in their lives that came with such a huge reward for doing so little work. Once they get that title of legislator, suddenly every door is held open for them, people laugh at all their jokes, they get more dates, their staff and interns and lobbyists tell them every day how they’re the greatest people in the world. It’s intoxicating and it is addictive. They essentially become drunk on power. They become convinced that even though there are millions of talented people in this world with many accomplishments, that all those other people can’t do the job. Only they, the current office holders, are qualified to do it, or else the world goes to hell in a hand basket. And Term Limits is viewed as the ultimate threat to that.
Nick Tomboulides:
Term Limits is an intervention aimed at curbing this addiction to power because we come along and say the gravy train is coming into the station now. It’s time to step off. And, like spoiled little children, they won’t step off and make room for someone else. Well, I’ll tell you what, on behalf of America, I’m sick and tired of this nonsense. If you’re not willing to vote for term limits, you should not have the title of representative. You should have it stripped off your freaking badge because you’re not representing anything but your own greed and your own self interest.
Nick Tomboulides:
And don’t get me started on the cowardice of all this. They lacked the guts in West Virginia to admit they oppose term limits. So what they did was they played all these sneaky little games to hide their true position. They said, oh, we’re just adding some amendments to the bill, or yeah, I’m just going to leave work and I’m going to let the son of a U.S. Senator chair this committee. That actually happened. They let the son of a United States Senator decide whether term limits would pass because politics is a family business in West Virginia. Do you not see the insanity of this?
Nick Tomboulides:
We need to unleash a new era in politics where these state legislators are scrutinized as hard as we scrutinize a president or a governor or anybody else because these people operate under the radar. They stab their own voters in the back, and they do so routinely, and nobody knows about it. No one knows. That is what the West Virginia legislature is. It is old guys in suits who stab voters in the back. And they should be ashamed of themselves right now.
Nick Tomboulides:
Last year, the Senate, state Senate, waited until the final day of session to bring up their resolution. This year, the House waits until the final day, and instead of doing their jobs, they kicked the can. They let the opposition add amendments. They stalled until the last possible day to run out the clock on us, and they were successful.
Nick Tomboulides:
I guess we really started to see the cracks in the wall about a week ago. Term limits Convention resolution had its final committee stop in the judiciary committee of the West Virginia House. That is where the opponents decided they would try to rip it to shreds. And instead of showing guts, instead of standing up to these cretins, our supporters essentially threw up a white flag and they surrendered.
Nick Tomboulides:
Our team out there, Shanna Chamblee and Aaron Dukette, have done such a marvelous job working the state. They have gone everywhere. They have attended grassroots events. They’ve developed relationships with these legislators. They have done educational campaigns to explain the Article V process, explain congressional term limits. They basically left no stone unturned and they left nothing off the field in their attempt to get this passed this session. So, all kudos to them for their very, very hard work. It’s the politicians who let everyone down here.
Nick Tomboulides:
Shanna and Aaron had gotten 46 pledges out of the West Virginia state legislature, which is a huge percentage of the legislature, maybe the highest percentage we have out of any state in the country. And yet, we had folks in the legislature who signed the pledge to support this bill and then reneged on their commitment and decided they would now be voting no.
Nick Tomboulides:
These members of the House of Delegates violated their pledges. Sammi Brown, Larry Cump, Nathan Brown, Mike Angelucci, and just yesterday, Chuck Little proudly boasted that he would be breaking his term limits pledge. Who boasts about being a dishonest person and breaking the word they made to their constituents. I mean, these people are disgusting. I wouldn’t trust these people to watch my dog if they can’t even be trusted to keep a simple promise they made to the voters, they should be thrown out of office. This is disgusting. Sammi Brown, Larry Cump, Nathan Brown, Mike Angelucci, and Chuck Little, you should be ashamed of yourselves, frankly. This is disgraceful.
Scott Tillman:
Hi, this is Scott Tillman, the National Field Director with U.S. Term Limits. We ask candidates for the state legislature to sign a pledge to help us get term limits on Congress. That 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. There are many legislative elections coming in 2020.
Scott Tillman:
Last week we had elections in several states, Super Tuesday. Those included North Carolina and Texas. In these states, we had many candidates who signed the pledge and several of them are now proceeding to runoffs or general election. 16 of 36 House signers in Texas, and two of four Senate signers in Texas are now proceeding to runoffs or the general election. And in North Carolina, 18 of 28 Senate candidates and 43 of 71 House candidates are now proceeding to the runoffs or to the general election. Term limits candidates are winning big. If you have access to a candidate, please ask them to sign our pledge. Pledges are available at termlimits.com.
Nick Tomboulides:
So, what happened was, in the judiciary committee, our guys abandoned the post in their committees. They let the term limits haters run roughshod and hold a successful vote about a week ago to kill the bill. But to his great credit, our state director, Aaron, discovered that the haters had screwed something up. They made the wrong ruling on holding a second vote, a reconsideration vote, to kill the bill, which basically translates to, we live to see another day.
Nick Tomboulides:
And that is when the scheming politicians started to get clever. They started to the bill with stupid amendments, one of which said, we aren’t going to change the Bill of Rights. Okay. I mean that’s a little redundant. It’s sort of like a, well duh. Term limits for Congress have nothing to do with the Bill of Rights, but this was sneaky and it was Machiavellian because now anyone who opposes this amendment can be painted as hating the Constitution, right?
Nick Tomboulides:
The next amendment was a poison pill that said this call for a convention to term limit Congress is not valid until the West Virginia legislature passes term limits on itself. We know pigs will fly before that ever happens, so this was effectively a second poison pill. But our guys, including folks who had signed our pledge, took the bait, and the bad guys who never wanted this to succeed, they celebrated. So, you have to kind of decide, is this cowardice, is it stupidity, or is it just some combination of the two? We don’t really know. We do know that the bill is dead as a result.
Nick Tomboulides:
And finally, from the floor this past Saturday, a member filed another amendment to replace our convention with a totally new convention that features other political topics. And that was not only the dumbest idea to date, but it was a guarantee we would be dead. They had engineered the downfall of the bill by creating this atmosphere of total chaos and total confusion.
Nick Tomboulides:
So, we will now have to wait at least another year to pass this in West Virginia. And the overall cause of fixing America, of term limiting Congress, of taking our Congress back, of sending a message to the political elite in Washington, D.C., has taken a severe hit. It has been damaged, all thanks to the cowardice and the gutlessness of these West Virginia legislators who can no longer call themselves representatives because they represent no one.
Nick Tomboulides:
I think every American should just be outraged with what’s going on here and what’s going on in all of our state legislators, all of our state legislatures, where fixing the Congress, fixing America, returning power to the people is a very low priority, if it’s a priority at all.
Nick Tomboulides:
Where do we go from here? I can only tell you what U.S. Term Limits will be doing. We will be making a list of every politician in West Virginia who had any hand in demolishing this bill. And if you are someone who proposed a stupid amendment, voted for one, signed a pledge, told us you were going to break the pledge, or even if you just did nothing, if you just sat on your hands and failed to stop the scam, your constituents will be hearing from us. They will learn about how you abandoned term limits for Congress, and we will be very aggressive in promoting that message to the American people because it matters, because this issue matters, because our country is too important to let these cowardly politicians get away with this.
Michael Smerconish:
In 2018, Neil Simon ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent in Maryland. He was ultimately unsuccessful, but he ran a hell of a race, at one point polling as high as 18% in the three-way race. He has just published a book. The book is called Contract to Unite America: 10 Reforms to Reclaim Our Republic. And he offers 10 specific reforms that he says will help us reclaim our Republic. I’m not giving away all 10, you’ll have to buy the book, but open primaries would be one. Altering the means by which we hold these debates would be another. Let me hit a third, and this comes up routinely on my program, Neil, term limits. How realistic that we can really get something done on term limits?
Neil Simon:
It’s hard. There are two of my 10 reforms that I recommend that require constitutional amendments, so there’s no question that it’s hard. There’s a terrific group called U.S. Term Limits that’s been working on this and has a number of states now behind it. I think the best chance for passing term limits would be in conjunction with campaign finance reform, and there are some people on the hill that have been trying to combine those two efforts together. One is favored more by Republicans, the other favored more by Democrats. They’re both massively favored by the American public. So all 10 reforms in my book are favored by at least 60% of Americans. Term limits, 83%. It’s the single most popular. And campaign finance reform is the second most popular. So, combining those two would make it more likely, but it does require a constitutional amendment so that you’re right that it’s…
Michael Smerconish:
Well, I remember a Congressman for whom I worked, and I hadn’t seen him in years, and I happened to see him recently at a legal forum, Jim Coyne. When he left the Congress after representing a suburban district outside of Philadelphia, he made this his issue and it seemed in the, I want to say late eighties, that we really had a shot, but I don’t hear it discussed all that much, at least not from elected officials.
Neal Simon:
Well, we had term limits in a number of states. So, in the early nineties, term limits were passed in 23 states by the state legislatures, restricting the terms for their federally elected officials, meaning that the states were deciding, hey, we’re going to set our own limits on the amount of time that somebody can serve in the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate.
Neal Simon:
It was in 1993 that there was a Supreme court ruling that overturned that. It was a five to four ruling that said that’s unconstitutional. The states cannot limit the amount of time that their representatives serve in Washington, so there was a lot of momentum behind it. The Supreme overturned it, and that’s why now that requires an amendment, a constitutional amendment, to get momentum behind it. But it’s massively popular among Americans. It seems the only people who don’t think that that would help us out are the people who are sitting in office today.
Michael Smerconish:
Neil, I know people in this audience. They’re listening to this conversation. They’re agreeing with everything we are saying. And if we ran through every one of the 10, they’d agree with all of them. And I happen to believe that you’re right, we do represent a majority. So, what’s the issue?
Neal Simon:
We need to get behind these reforms. And the issue is that the insiders in both parties, a lot of the people in Washington will fight them because it’s to the disadvantage of the political insiders, of the political elite who have manipulated the rules to benefit the two parties. They’ve basically turned our electoral system into one where you have two semifinals and it’s impossible to compete outside of that structure. And then what you need to do to win those two semifinals is to appeal to the base of one party or the other.
Neal Simon:
So most Americans don’t consider themselves far left or far right. Most Americans are like you and me, and this was my experience on the campaign trail. I think Americans are dying for this country to come together. They’re starved for it, and they know that we’re better when we come together. So we’ve got to get behind this set of reforms.
Neal Simon:
The good news is there is some momentum. In 2018, you had 23 reforms that were passed at the state level, including some money in politics reforms, including independent redistricting in Michigan, including ranked-choice voting in Maine statewide. And you’ve got 45 different initiatives right now, at the state level, around the country on different issues in the 2020 cycle. So, hopefully we’ll pass more at the state level. And then, ultimately, what we want to have happen is for this to turn into an era like the progressive era a hundred years ago, where you have a set of reforms, some through legislation, a couple potentially through constitutional amendments, and that would change the nature of American politics.
Neal Simon:
People always ask me, why do we end up with these choices, these choices where they feel like they have to choose between the lesser of two evils? And it’s because of the way our system has been manipulated, and they’re all things that we can change. None of them are in the Constitution.
Michael Smerconish:
The deck is stacked against change for sure. And I would just add a postscript on what you said, which is we need more passion among this exhausted majority. People listening to you are about to get out of their cars and like, yeah, that guy made a lot of sense, but I’ve got to go to work now, or I’ve got to drop off the kids, or I’ve got to go take care of my daily responsibilities. They’ve got to get in the game, otherwise it doesn’t change.
Neal Simon:
They do need to get in the game, and they can do it through organizations like Unite America, and RepresentUs, and American Promise is an amazing organization working on campaign finance reform, or U.S. Term Limits, the one I mentioned before, or Issue One. There are some incredible organizations that are fighting for the types of things that I wrote about in Contract to Unite America.
Philip Blumel:
Thanks for joining us for another week of No Uncertain Terms. The bill in Florida to put eight year school board term limits on the ballot statewide in November has passed all its committee stops and has been approved by the full House. After passing the Senate rules committee, the bill is now headed to the Senate floor for final approval. Everything weighs on this one vote, which is awaiting scheduling. Florida state senators need to hear from you right now.
Philip Blumel:
If you live in Florida, please go to termlimits.com, and under the current actions tab along the top, you will see the action item for Florida School Board Term Limits. Click it. Use the online tool to send your senator message. It’ll take two minutes, no more. Now, you may have sent a message already, or maybe you’ve done it several times as the bill made its way through the committee process, but do it one more time. This is the final vote. Tell him to vote yes. The vote is imminent. Thank you. We’ll be back next week.
Stacey Selleck:
Follow us on most social media at U.S. Term Limits.
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USTL.