Term limits bill introduced

At last!  A hint of san­i­ty invades the Kentucky leg­is­la­ture as two Republican house mem­bers have co-spon­sored a bill to lim­it the terms of Kentucky legislators.

House Bill 288, co-spon­sored by Representative Kim Banta (District 63) and Representative Kim Holloway (District 2) is pref­aced as: AN ACT propos­ing an amend­ment to sec­tion 32 of the Constitution of Kentucky relat­ing to terms of mem­bers of the General Assembly.

The bill pro­pos­es to sub­mit to the vot­ers of Kentucky an amend­ment that would like­ly be stat­ed on the bal­lot as fol­lows:  “Are you in favor of lim­it­ing a Senator to four terms in the Kentucky Senate, and lim­it­ing a Representative to six term in the Kentucky House of Representatives, begin­ning with the reg­u­lar elec­tion of 2028, by amend­ing the Constitution of Kentucky to read as stat­ed below.”

Should any­one be inter­est­ed in what Section 32 says, it is a very short sec­tion of only 112 words and sim­ply lists the qual­i­fi­ca­tions nec­es­sary to hold a posi­tion as a Kentucky Senator or Representative, all with­out any ref­er­ence at all to the length of terms of office.

House Bill 288 is only two-and-a-half pages long and Section 2(2) is quite spe­cif­ic in defin­ing the intent of the legislation.

No per­son shall be elect­ed to more than six terms of office as a mem­ber of the House of Representatives, or to more than four terms of office as a mem­ber of the Senate.  In deter­min­ing the eli­gi­bil­i­ty of an indi­vid­ual to hold an office as pro­vid­ed in this sec­tion, time served in an office in ful­fill­ment of a par­tial term as a result of a spe­cial elec­tion to fill a vacan­cy shall not be con­sid­ered unless the par­tial term is two full years or more.  Any per­son who is elect­ed to an office in a reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled elec­tion and resigns pri­or to the com­ple­tion of the term for which he or she was elect­ed shall be con­sid­ered to have served the full term in that office.

It is incred­i­bly unusu­al to see elect­ed offi­cials mov­ing to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion which affects their own posi­tions as this one does. Obviously, dur­ing this leg­isla­tive ses­sion there will be a good deal of oppo­si­tion to even plac­ing this ques­tion before the electorate.

In fact, Republican House Speaker David Osborne has already revealed his atti­tude about term lim­its by respond­ing to reporters’ ques­tions and not­ing that, “Every two years we have elec­tions.  So, I think we have pret­ty effec­tive term limits.” 

This is an atti­tude that has his­tor­i­cal­ly been almost uni­ver­sal­ly adopt­ed by those already in office.  It will be inter­est­ing to see if the Republican cau­cus even allows this amend­ment to get on the bal­lot.  Just as inter­est­ing will be see­ing how the minor­i­ty Democrats react to the bill.

I believe I know how the Kentucky vot­er will react to it if it ever makes it to an elec­tion vote.

Further, Republican Senator and Majority Floor Leader Max Wise has filed a res­o­lu­tion that would add Kentucky to states seek­ing a nation­al con­ven­tion to pro­pose an amend­ment to the U.S. Constitution impos­ing term lim­its on mem­bers of Congress.  A noble ges­ture, but this one is unlike­ly to pro­duce any trac­tion, since appar­ent­ly every mem­ber of Congress seems to think that they are imbued with qual­i­ties that enti­tle them to life­time terms.

Roman gen­er­al Cincinnatus is often cit­ed as the exem­plary exam­ple of what a politi­cian should be.  He served in numer­ous high Roman offices and relin­quished his sta­tus as a states­man to retire to a life of farm­ing.  He was sub­se­quent­ly sum­moned back to ser­vice as leader of the Roman forces fight­ing a bat­tle against the Aequi.  After respond­ing to the call and lead­ing the Romans to vic­to­ry in six­teen days, he once again returned to his life of farming.

Many of the papers writ­ten by our found­ing fathers strong­ly sug­gest that the prop­er role of a politi­cian is to serve hon­or­ably for a peri­od of time (nev­er cod­i­fied any­where in the Constitution) and to then return to civil­ian life.  There is vir­tu­al­ly no sug­ges­tion that pol­i­tics should be a life­time avocation.

House Bill 288 deserves a fair and con­sid­er­ate hear­ing, and the Kentucky vot­er deserves a chance to voice his or her opin­ion as to whether or not our politi­cians can most faith­ful­ly serve under term-lim­it­ed circumstances.