Philip Blumel:
Is COVID-19 the incumbent politician’s best friend? Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the term limits movement for the week of April 6, 2020.
Stacey Selleck:
Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel:
Around the world, the new coronavirus has halted important protest movements. In Hong Kong, where large scale protests raged last year, the streets are silent after the government has banned gatherings of more than four people. In Algeria, where a protest movement ousted a 20 year president and was noisily demanding term limits and other political reforms, the streets too are now empty. In Washington, DC, the genuine need for assistance from people locked out of work has allowed politicians to open the spending spigot, rewarding special interests with early Christmas presents unrelated to the pandemic. Lastly, around the states, our legislators are shuttering their doors and windows right in the middle of the busiest legislative season. What has this done to the effort to pass state applications for the term limits convention? For some answers, we turned to Nick Tomboulides, executive director of US Term Limits. Hey Nick.
Nick Tomboulides:
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. I don’t even know what time it is anymore. The days in the corona era are just blurring together.
Philip Blumel:
In your bunker with the windows shut, the door shut.
Nick Tomboulides:
I have sprayed hyper disinfecting hand sanitizer on all of my windows and I am currently wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy.
Philip Blumel:
All right. Well Nick, seriously, I think that for all of our activists and all of our donors, I think we need to have a frank discussion about the state of the term limits movement in the wake of this virus crisis. We started out this year with tremendous optimism and we had a solid team in place and we had a strategy to secure multiple state calls for the term limits convention, and then this thing hits. First let’s start out with some health details. Is everybody okay? How many people are there that work with US Term Limits, and how’s everybody doing?
Nick Tomboulides:
We have about 15 full-timers throughout the country, and so far I have not heard any indications that anyone is having any health issues right now. Thank God. I mean health issues that are not preexisting. We’ve got some family members of of employees who are going through a difficult time right now, but that’s not related to the coronavirus.
Philip Blumel:
And most of us, of course, are working from home, and even you and I are not actually in the same room, although it might sound like it.
Nick Tomboulides:
Why’d you have to pull back the curtain and expose the business like that?
Philip Blumel:
I’m just into transparency, that’s all. Into being honest and forthright with our constituency, unlike members of the US Congress, that’s all.
Nick Tomboulides:
Yeah. Well so far, fingers crossed, everyone has been well. Most people are at home. Most people are working on their computers, working from their phones, calling legislators 24/7, because the elections have not been canceled. The 2020 elections for state legislatures. They have been postponed in a lot of states. Four states at least, that we’re active in. Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky have all delayed their primaries by a month. Some of them have delayed it from late April to June or May into June, but we’re trying to see the upside of that. What that means is it’s an opportunity for our folks and our volunteers and our activists to get with candidates and ask them to sign the term limits pledge. We’ve now got more time to ask candidates to sign the term limits pledge.
Nick Tomboulides:
We need to get those asks in before the election because after an election, what happens to politicians? They disappear faster than Carol Baskin’s husband. So we’ve got to sink our claws into them right now. Now is the time and we’ve got an expanded opportunity. So our folks are calling legislators, we’re talking to them. I’m personally calling legislators. I’ve been making phone calls into the state of Kentucky to get pledges, got a couple of those back a few days ago and I’m following up. And then once you have the pledges, we can go in and we can do voter education, let the people know who the good guys and the bad guys are on term limits.
Philip Blumel:
The downside of this clearly has been the shutdown of all these legislatures. We had a bunch of targeted states. I assume that with these legislatures shut and us not being able to talk to legislators and the votes not being held that we’re being shut down for this year on our effort to pass term limits convention bills, am I right?
Nick Tomboulides:
For the most part. It looks like there are shutdowns but they may be temporary and depending on what the guidelines are coming from the CDC or whoever, there’s always a chance that they could reopen later on or run a late session and just push it back by a couple months. So there may be some light at the end of the tunnel for this. But I would not put my eggs in that basket. It’s looking like what most states plan to do is just reconvene briefly to focus on the budget, get their budgets done, then gavel it out until the next year. We can’t know for sure because there’s just so much uncertainty right now.
Philip Blumel:
Sure. Now the groundwork that we’ve laid, first of all, in collecting the pledges from these members of these legislatures around the states, they are still in place and so all the groundwork that we laid last year for this year’s sessions, it’s all still here, so it’s just a matter of capitalizing on them at a later time.
Nick Tomboulides:
Again, our organization, we don’t endorse any candidates, but candidates endorse us and we let the public know who has endorsed this term limits platform, because when this crisis is over, when these states finally reconvene and they get back to business, we’re going to need that core of term limits supporters, that army of elected officials who are willing to go to the mat and fight for this.
Philip Blumel:
Right. So legislators can’t just vote against it and then hope no one notices because we’re going to make sure that people notice because we’re going to put that information right in front of voters, as many voters as we can, and we keep ramping up the number of voters we’re reaching.
Scott Tillman:
Hi, this is Scott Tillman, the national field director with US Term Limits. I’m here with a pledge update. We ask candidates for Congress and candidates for state legislature to sign a pledge that will help us term limit Congress. At present, 70 members of the US Congress have taken a pledge to cosponsor and support the US term limits amendment of three house terms and two Senate terms and no longer limit. Over 130 non-incumbent candidates that are running for Congress have also signed this pledge this cycle. We have over 300 incumbent state legislators that have pledged to cosponsor, vote for, and defend the resolution applying for an article five convention for the sole purpose of enacting term limits on Congress and an additional 300 non-incumbent candidates for state legislature have signed this pledge. If you have access to a candidate, please ask them to sign our pledge. Pledges are available at termlimits.com.
Nick Tomboulides:
I think we’re all… we’re extra motivated too right now because we’re all so disgusted by what’s happening in Washington DC at the moment. It’s lighting a fire under everybody to fight harder than ever before for term limits, albeit remotely.
Philip Blumel:
Yeah. Well as I mentioned in the intro, in a lot of ways, this virus crisis really empowers incumbent politicians, not just in the U.S., but around the world, and it also empowers another one of our great nemeses, the lobbying industry. Last time there was a big crisis that required bailouts, this is back in 2008, 2009, we saw a 22% growth in the lobbyist industry and of course there’s more stimulus bills coming, so everybody wants to be positioned to get a piece of that pie.
Nick Tomboulides:
It’s disgusting. You could see potentially 2,500, 2,600 new lobbyists getting enrolled to fight for different handouts and carve-outs and loans and all kinds of things, they’re going to ratchet up the national debt. We don’t talk about the national debt that often, but I think it’s okay to talk about because it is a bipartisan issue. You look at polls and people across the political spectrum are very concerned about this, and I’m wondering, are we just going to pretend like the country isn’t already $24 trillion in debt? What is going to happen now with all of this new borrowing, all of this new spending, there’s going to be a significant drop off in tax receipts, so revenue to the federal government is going to plummet as a result of the economy being shut down by so many governors, all of these executive orders, it’s basically illegal to go to work if you’re in like a traditional service profession at the moment right now.
Nick Tomboulides:
50 million people have lost their jobs. So the unemployment rate is going to hit, I guess 30%, it’s like Great Depression levels. The entire economy is collapsing and we’re spending this money at an unsustainable pace. But when you look at the package that was just passed by the Senate and the House, it was a $2.2 trillion bailout, and if you divide 2.2 trillion by the population, the 320 million, that should mean every American is getting a check for six grand or over six grand. Is that what’s happening? Is every American getting a check for $6,000? Hell no. No, they’re getting 1200 bucks. So my question is, where the hell is all the other money going? It looks to be one of the biggest congressional heists of all time. You’ve got $100 billion in there that’s going to the hospitals, the medical providers. Nobody’s going to argue with that. You’ve got people dying and you got people need supplies, ventilators, testing.
Philip Blumel:
Maybe when you see Boeing or a company like that that had trouble before, unrelated to the coronavirus, is in big trouble, and then of course they get hit with a double whammy that their customers are airlines. You see that they’re directly in the line of the virus in some ways and you shrug your shoulders and say, “Okay, they got a lobbyist that’s in there.” We’ve got the restaurant industry that has to lay off everybody right now. A lot of people can see this, how it relates to what’s going on in this country, but some of this stuff like with the worker visas, nothing to do with it.
Nick Tomboulides:
I’m going down the list of some of these giveaways. $50 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 75 million for public broadcasting, 88 million for the Peace Corps, 150 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, billion dollars for Amtrak. It just doesn’t make any sense. And until you start to look at who is being serviced by all of this, who were the lobbyist fighting for all of this stuff, the Hotel Lodging Association, the Airlines for America Franchise Association, Travel Association, Restaurant Association. There is a lobbyist in this bill for every special interest in the world except for the American people. There’s nobody standing up in Washington, maybe with the exception of one or two Congress members, fighting to have this money directed to the right areas, to actually help people.
Philip Blumel:
And only the right areas. I mean the wind and solar tax credits made their way in, just all this crazy stuff that may be worth considering on its own has got nothing to do with it, but everybody is saying yes to everything and so everybody gets everything they want. James Clyburn, Democratic leader in the House was quoted as saying, “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” I think that about sums it up, and of course their vision is padding their own pockets.
Speaker 4:
Boys, meet Senator Smith.
Speaker 5:
You act like a man with something on your mind.
Speaker 6:
Why don’t you tell people the truth for a change?
Speaker 5:
The truth, the man wants the truth.
Speaker 7:
The man wants the truth.
Speaker 8:
What is the truth, said jesting pilot, and would not stay for an answer?
Speaker 9:
How do you want it, senator, dished out or in a bottle?
Speaker 10:
The people of this country pick up their papers and what do they read? Well, this morning they read that an incompetent clown had arrived in Washington parading like a member of the Senate.
Philip Blumel:
I’ll tell you who would’ve been a great help in Washington, DC over the last couple of weeks.
Nick Tomboulides:
George Washington.
Philip Blumel:
Well, George Washington, indeed, but I’m thinking of former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. I mentioned in the last podcast that he had just passed away and I wanted to spend a little more time on him because he was not only a great friend of the term limits movement, but also the kind of guy that dedicated his career to trying to stop this kind of lobbyist and professional politician driven largesse to special interests. It was his singular focus of being in the Congress and he passed away at age 72, two weeks ago now, of prostate cancer. He was first elected in 1994. He left after three terms in 2000. He had pledged that he was only going to be in there for three terms.
Philip Blumel:
He spent about five years out of the Congress, went back to his practice as a obstetrician in Oklahoma and then he said that he was sickened by the Bush administration spending binge and ran for the Senate, was elected in 2006, pledged only to serve two terms in the Senate. And both of these I would note are completely in line, these three terms in the house, two terms in the Senate, with the US term limits amendment, which he not only was a cosponsor but actually a chief sponsor of for a time.
Nick Tomboulides:
Great guy and such a model for what it means to have integrity as a public leader and to be a statesman. I was reading something about him. He was a senator when Obama was president, and at one point he had a great quote. It was like, “Obama’s policies, terrible. I disagree with the guy 99% of the time, but we’re good friends. We get along, we don’t demonize people just because we disagree with them. I’m going to work as hard as I can to get this guy unelected as the president because I disagree with him, but he’s still a good friend of mine.” I just thought that was such a nice uniquely American thing that… You don’t see civility like that in Washington anymore.
Nick Tomboulides:
I ran into Coburn a couple of years ago in, I think it was New Orleans, and he was giving a speech on Article V and term limits and I will tell you, he had not lost any of the passion or commitment to term limits that he had when he first started out. Up until his dying breath he was still a fighter. He was still calling for a convention. He actually called this, I think, the fight of his life to try to get the convention of states passed so that the states could reform the federal government. He was traveling around America, even though he was sick, he was still traveling and he was still speaking out about the need to do that and get us back on track.
Nick Tomboulides:
And as you said back in the 90s there were a lot of Congress members who signed a pledge saying they would term limit themselves out of office, and as it turned out, a lot of them were full of crap. They faced a lot of pressure to cave into the swamp and break their word. But Coburn never cared. He never bucked under the pressure. He was a man of integrity. He knew he had a real career to go back to because he was a doctor. He was not dependent on politics for his livelihood and he kept his word, unlike so many others. It’s a devastating loss and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family.
Philip Blumel:
Absolutely. Let’s hear Senator Coburn’s support fraternal limits from his own lips. This is from the Senate floor.
Tom Coburn:
I have filed an amendment which would place term limits on members of Congress. Because you see, the number one requirement right now in this body for most politicians of both sides is get reelected. That’s why we’re not addressing the real issues. Then what we ought to do is at least do something to secure the future, to say that our own worst tendencies won’t be exaggerated in the future by putting term limits on members of Congress. The system is rigged for incumbents. It’s totally rigged for incumbents. At one point last year, the approval rating for Congress got down to 8%. Oklahoma had term limits for its members of Congress. Oklahomans believe in it. It’s actually a 72 to 80% issue all across the country. Americans believe in it. But the politicians in Washington are never going to vote for it because it puts them second and the country first. And so what this place is, it’s a show place. And the downside is, is the country suffers.
Tom Coburn:
So instead of the greatest deliberative body in the world, what you have in the Senate today is the greatest political body in the world that doesn’t care about deliberation, only cares about winning the next election. The American people get it. The question is what can they do about it, and what you have to do is you got to eventually have term limits so that we take the inherent bias of the career politician out of the mix and we make it not about the politicians, but we return the Senate to about what’s in the best interest of the country. And quite frankly, for the last three and a half years, that hadn’t been what’s been happening in this body.
Philip Blumel:
One last anecdote I want to share about Tom Coburn. He was fighting for a term limit legislature, a citizen legislature, and he made his best effort to stay a citizen even as a member of the Congress. He was an obstetrician, ran a practice, and he tried to continue to deliver babies and remain a doctor even as a member of Congress. Now of course that breaks some of the Senate quote unquote ethics rules and the members of Congress actually filed complaints about him continuing with the business, so they wanted to shut him down for delivering babies.
Nick Tomboulides:
It’s not the first time Congress has shut down a business.
Philip Blumel:
No, it was not and it won’t be the last, unfortunately. But that just, I think, shows the kind of man of Tom Coburn was. He believed in a citizen legislature and he wanted to be a citizen legislator, and that is quite a legacy for any other term limits supporters in the Congress to try to follow.
Nick Tomboulides:
Amen. One thing that separates most state legislatures from Congress is that when you are elected to a state legislature, you are allowed to keep your job, so you maintain that connectivity to the private sector, and you’re also allowed to primarily live in your district, live at home, or live closer to home than you would if you had to fly thousands of miles to Washington DC, and I think maintaining those ties to your constituents is so instrumental. One little glimmer of hope we have now during this current crisis is there is some debate about whether members of Congress will be able to vote remotely. They’re saying, “Why don’t we make it a temporary thing? Vote remotely for 30 days.”
Nick Tomboulides:
They’re saying why not make it a permanent thing? Why not force members of Congress to live in their damn districts, spend time around the people instead of around these lobbyists and agency heads and bureaucrats and fawning little toady staffers all the time. Make them live in their districts so that they have to go to the grocery store and their constituent can grab them by the jacket and say, “Hey, why the hell did you vote for that piece of junk?” And if that were to happen, you would be modifying and fixing a lot of the wrong attitudes you see in Congress. You’d be erasing a lot of the arrogance in elitism that prevails there.
Philip Blumel:
Some good ideas like that might come out of this bad situation. Let’s hope so. Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. It is a tragedy for our nation that professional politicians who do not face significant electoral competition and are so distant, so divorced from the concerns and needs of working Americans, that they are at the helm during this current crisis. It’s enough to make you sick. America needs term limits on its Congress. You’ve signed already, I know, but let’s get our friends and family to sign the online petition for congressional term limits. Go to termlimits.com/petition, copy that webpage address and send it to everyone you know with a note urging them to sign. We’ll be back next week. Thank you.
Speaker 12:
The revolution isn’t being televised. Fortunately you have the No Uncertain Terms podcast.
Speaker 13:
USTL.