At Governor Holden's monthly Pizza and Politics forum Wednesday evening, Ed Martin, the Republican challenging Russ Carnahan next year, and Chris Kelly, a Democratic representative who was elected in Columbia just last year, faced off on the question of term limits.
Kelly spoke first. Because he had previously served in the legislature for twelve years in the eighties and early nineties, he had the historical knowledge to appreciate how the House differs from what it used to be. His main argument was that term limits destroy necessary institutional memory and depth of knowledge. Bitter partisanship fills the gap left by departing long term legislators.
Kelly pointed out that currently, each party caucuses with its members twice a week, and they use those occasions to "throw each other partisan red meat" and "inflame sectarian passion." In the past, he says, representatives had served with each other sometimes for decades. It was harder to characterize someone as a mindless Republican shill if you had been to his daughter's wedding.
And people voted their own conscience instead of lock stepping with their party.
"In the bad ole days before we had term limits, we caucused twice a session because no one in their right mind would go to the caucus and listen to their political party tell them how to vote." Kelly maintained that if the party had tried to tell them how to vote, legislative giants like John Schneider and Wayne Goode would have said something like "'Go to hell. I know what I'm supposed to do. I've been on this issue for many, many years. I understand the issue very well. I've spent my entire adult life studying it, and I'm gonna decide how I'm going to vote based on that store of knowledge.'"
The video clip begins with Kelly describing how much less today's legislators know:
Kelly said that members used to figure that about one fourth of the House were the hard working representatives who got the bulk of the work accomplished. That's still true, he said. Only now that hard working one fourth doesn't have as many tools, as much knowledge, to start with.
Ed Martin, the founder of Term Limits for Missouri, defended term limits. He averred that the current climate is well served by them. For every John Schneider that the legislature loses, it gets other good replacements, and he would rather have fresh faces arriving. Sure, Schneider is gone, but Tim Green and Barbara Fraser served well. Barbara Fraser, in turn, was term limited out, but she served on the St. Louis County Council and will probably run next year for Joan Bray's senate seat.
Term Limits have some apparent flaws. The main pro of term limits from my point of view involves Matt Bartle and Cynthia Davis not being in the state government in 2011. Although i'd imagine that the number of good legislators forced out by term limits has to be far longer than the list of controversial/lousy legislators forced out by term limits.
Term limits, as they are presently mandated, do as much harm as good. Certainly, the motivation for enacting them was understandable: citizens were fed up with a system where incumbents could scarcely be blasted out of office with anything short of an IED. But the eight-year term limit solution produced, at best, a situation where somewhat experienced lawmakers lead rank beginners through a complex process.
Uh-oh. Joint efforts of any kind do best with a mixture of newcomers with fresh ideas and people who've been around the block often enough to predict where the bumps and snarls will occur. Legislatures are no different. Let me invite any of our current legislators who read this posting--or anyone else, for that matter--to provide examples of problems that could have been avoided in recent sessions if a few old timers had been around.
And aside from creating glitches that should have been foreseen, the whole impermanency thing begets another problem: it contributes to the partisan fissures that cripple our state government. People who know what the lege used to be like say that reps could disagree on the floor and then go out for a brew together in the evening. Sure, I understand that part of the reason that no longer happens is the essential meanness of so many Republicans now. But part of the reason must also be that there's little incentive to bridge the gaps when either you or the people you're fighting with will be gone in a year or two.
Connie Johnson, who is still debating whether to throw her hat in the Fifth Senatorial ring, has been trying, literally since the day after the 2006 election, to get herself, Robin Wright Jones, and Rodney Hubbard together to discuss how they could agree on one of them to run. (If you need the background on why that would be necessary, see my last posting.) The three of them met for breakfast the day after the election to discuss that question. Obviously, they did not resolve it.
What she wants is some way for all of them to come out a winner, and what she means by that is that they would agree on which one of them would run, but they would also agree on something those who dropped out could expect. Johnson cited the example last year of Barbara Fraser and Jake Zimmerman, who both wanted to run for a seat on the County Council. Fraser was term limited out of the House, so someone talked Zimmerman into running for her House seat instead. He's now a rep and she's a Council member. That's what Johnson means by everyone being a winner.
That particular solution wouldn't work in the Fifth District, but if the person chosen to run were to win the race, he or she could use the appointive powers of the office to put the other two on whatever commission or board interested them.
But there was a glitch: All three of them were more interested in appointing the other two than in staying out of the race.
Maida Coleman, senate minority leader, knows how bitter some of the Democrats are about the way they were treated last spring. Whenever they felt duty bound to filibuster something truly horrific, like MOSTEALA, the Republicans used a rare tactic called Moving the Previous Question (PQ) to end debate. What was used only seven times in thirty years (from 1970-2005) was used three time last spring. Democrats are ... well, they're pissed off. Senate minority floor leader, Maida Coleman puts it more delicately:
"Based on conversations, I already know that some Democratic legislators are still feeling what occurred during the regular session," Ms. Coleman told the News-Press. "They're still concerned and disappointed about the Republican leadership's way of conducting business."
But then gets earthier:
"My hope is ... we'll get out without too much blood being let."
