By Steve Wilson | Mississippi Watchdog
Mississippi legislators and other officer holders could be limited to
two consecutive four-year terms, like the governor and lieutenant
governor.
Problem is, good legislators — as well as the bad — would be cast out
by the ballot initiative, filed with the Mississippi Secretary of
State’s office by Keith Plunkett, the policy and communications director
for state Sen. Chris McDaniel’s United Conservatives Fund.
The initiative is proposed to stem the power of incumbency and end
the corruption instituted by career politicians. To summarize — throw
the bums out and their waste, fraud and abuse with it.
Plunkett told Mississippi Watchdog the biggest reason for filing for a
ballot initiative was to get the public more involved in the political
process. Incumbents are able to raise huge war chests with ease, and it
often has a chilling effect on potential challengers by ending the
battle before it begins.
“It’s about getting the public to re-engage and actually have access
to the machine of government as it functions in the Legislature,”
Plunkett said. “Elections will become more about policy rather than
personality or the guy with the coolest logo. It becomes much, much more
about policy.”
Nathan Shrader is an assistant professor of political science at
Millsaps College who served as a legislative aide in both the
Pennsylvania Senate and the Virginia General Assembly.
Term limits can have serious, unintended consequences, he says.
“I don’t think this is the panacea that a lot of reformers think that
it would be,” Shrader said. He cited the book “Term Limits and The
Dismantling of State Legislature Professionalism,” from 2005 by Thad Kousser.
Shrader said some of those consequences in three states — California,
Colorado and Maine — studied by Kousser included a power shift to
the executive branch, a big gain of strength of party leadership in the
legislatures over their caucuses and the need for legislatures to hire
more staff to deal with inexperienced lawmakers.
“In California, when the Legislature lost some of the institutional
memory of the members who’d been there a long time, they also lost some
of the legislators who were the most knowledgeable about how to position
yourself as the legislative branch against the governor,” Shrader said.
“In Colorado, Kousser found that the leadership of both parties got
stronger because members had less experience and less knowledge of the
functions of the legislative branch. They were leaning on and taking
orders from the party leaders more than they used to.”
History isn’t kind in its judgment of term limits as a means of reform.
Term limits were one of the more popular reforms back in the early
1990s, a wave that began when voters in California, Colorado and
Oklahoma approved ballot initiatives. Mississippi tried to jump into the
fray with two ballot initiatives in 1995 and 1999. Both went over like a
glam metal album in the grunge era. Plunkett said the landscape has
changed.
“Sixteen years is a long time, and in politics we talk about a few
months as being a lifetime,” Plunkett said. “It was a totally different
political atmosphere back then. I think people are ready for this now.”
The wave of term limits eventually crested, and only 15 states,
according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, have term
limits for state legislators. Four states, either by court action or by
legislative action, scrapped their term limits.
Shrader said that in a state such as Mississippi, where state
legislators only make $10,000 per session and $123 per diem per day, the
prevention of career politicians doesn’t figure into the case for term
limits as in states where the Legislature meets year-round and it’s a
full-time job.
California was a trailblazer for term limits and is one of several
states with the harshest laws on the books. Mississippi’s proposal would
limit lawmakers to two consecutive terms then allow them to do
something else for a few years before restarting the limit clock with
another election.
California, however, has a lifetime ban on those who serve three
consecutive terms. It has spent billions on high-speed rail, presided
over a pension system that is reaching its breaking point and have
passed crippling tax increases. It also, for example, had time to pass a
law regulating the appearance of toy guns and another requiring smart phones to have a “kill switch.”
