TERM LIMITS: clearing out entrenched corruption or speeding revolving door corruption?

[yurbud]

California has a term limits proposition on the ballot that re-arranges the deck chairs but doesn't really attack the premise of term limits, that pols become entrenched and corrupt if they are in place for a long time.

I suspect it's quite the opposite. If an elected official knows he's going to be out the door after a set number of years, he has even more incentive to do favors for lobbyists who represent his future employer as a corporate officer, board member, or lobbyist. He needs to start lining up that job a lot sooner.

Also, since there aren't term limits on lobbyists, they become the top experts on working the system and can easily play the unseasoned pols.

If combating corruption is the primary goal, a better way to do it would be to ban lobbying or working for corporations or financial institutions long enough for a pols influence and contacts to wither away, and at the national level like senators, cabinet members, and pentagon generals who get a very nice pension, it should be for life.

[dysfunctional press]

1. how about a system where incumbants have to get a 51% confidence vote every two years....

the 51% number is just one i'm throwing out, but it would work like this- in june of the election year, every congressperson would face a confidence vote- yea or nay and would have to get 51% support of the votes cast- those who make it keep their seats...for those that don't- their district has an election in november, for which the incumbant is not eligble to run.

i also kind of like china's system of capital punishment for political corruption. if politicians want to tout the death penalty as a deterrent to crime- let's see how it works as a deterrent to their crimes.

[yurbud]

2. I think that capital punishment system could work if it was a jury trial and no corporate execs...

lobbyists, lawyers, or other pols could serve on the jury.

[KansDem]

3. We have "term limits"--they're called "elections"

Because we don't vote, or vote ignorantly, doesn't mean the system isn't working.

Personally, I'm offended by this "Stop me before I vote again" mentality...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Term limits in the Oregon legislature have meant that 1/3 of each house

is complete newbies every year. Many have never held office before, so they're completely clueless and have no institutional memory.

The reason we have such a high rate of incumbents being re-elected, the answer is public financing and an absolute ban on campaign contributions by anyone who is not an individual human being in the usual sense of the word.

(If corporations are persons, then their income should be taxed at personal rates, and they should otherwise be subject to all the laws that individual human beings are subject to.)

[warren pease]

5. Lots of factors and variables...

First, we absolutely have to move to public financing of campaigns and get obsessive about oversight to keep any and all corporate/oligarchy money out of politicians' pockets.

What we have now is a thoroughly corrupt third-world bribocracy, with most of those bribes going to incumbents, with incumbents winning something like 97 percent of the time and those incumbents immediately sucking up to their wealthy employers in the political donor class and doing all they can to make life better and richer for those who funded their campaigns.

So first eliminate private money and you eliminate lobbyists, PACs, individual "donors," and the rest of the shadow people who routinely buy a Senator or three, along with a few House members and a regulatory agency administrator who deals with the specific industry the "donor" just happens to be involved with.

By getting rid of private money, you also make it far easier to defeat incumbents, since all candidates start their campaigns with equal sums of money and challengers are no longer getting outspent 10 or 20 to 1, which is what usually happens.

Next, as you say, you make it legally impossible for term-limited pols to go to work in any capacity for any corporation in any industry that was regulated by any committee or subcommittee they held a seat on at any time during their lives in public service -- no matter the position -- all the way from alderman to Senator and every office they've held in between. No more revolving door and the inevitable corruption that goes with it.

If they're trained as lawyers, they can go back to practicing law. If they're plumbers by trade, they can go back to snaking drains. But no lobbying for companies in industries they used to oversee when they were in Congress.

Somebody's bound to sue to overturn those restrictions on the grounds of illegal restraint of trade or circumventing the right to work laws. But I think courts could make exceptions in the case of influence peddling on the part of former legislators. There's no ethical way they should be able to leverage the knowledge and back-door contacts they're accumulated while "serving" the public.

I'd be willing to let those two new rules work for awhile and evaluate the results before taking further steps, like individual states trying to impose term limits on federal offices. And even that gets all twisted around by the time voters go to the polls. For example:

Maybe 8 - 10 years ago, something like 13 states had initiatives on their ballots to impose term limits on their state politicians.

Term limits passed in every one of these states. Simultaneously, all incumbents were reelected in all these same states. Which says to me these voters are either a) thick as a railroad tie, or b) think everybody else's representatives are bastards, but love their own. Better the devil you know than the one you don't?

Anyway, that's what I think this fine Monday morning.


wp