Terminally inept?

National Review, March 9, 1998 by John J. Miller

Mr. Miller is NR's national political reporter and author of The Unmaking of Americans, which the Free Press will publish in May.

ON the afternoon of February 5, Tom Bordonaro dropped by the Washington, D.C. office of U.S. Term Limits. He didn't have an appointment, but he won an audience with USTL executive director Paul Jacob anyway.

At the meeting -- described by both sides as cordial -- the wheelchair-bound Bordonaro asked Jacob a pair of simple questions: "Why are you supporting the election of someone who opposes term limits? And why are you opposing me, a term-limits supporter?"

Bordonaro is the Republican candidate to fill the California congressional seat left empty when Rep. Walter Capps (D.) died last October. In the voting this January, done as a primary, USTL and Americans for Limited Terms, a Wisconsin-based sister organization, spent roughly $100,000 to defeat him. But Bordinaro bested Brooks Firestone, the favorite of establishment Republicans (including the Republican National Committee), and forced a runoff with the only Democrat in the race, Lois Capps, Walter Capps's widow. They will meet in a special election March 10.

USTL and ALT continue to work overtime to elect Capps, who is on the record as opposing mandatory term limits, and to beat Bordonaro, who has promised repeatedly to vote for any term-limits bill that crosses his desk, including a constitutional amendment. ALT's Eric O'Keefe estimates that his organization will spend at least $200,000, most of it on television ads, in the attempt to keep Bordonaro out of Congress.

This counter-intuitive tack is prompting conservatives in Washington and around the country to question the shrewdness of the current leadership of the term-limits movement and to wonder if the idea of term limits itself has outlived its usefulness. "With friends like these," asks Cleta Mitchell, a veteran term-limits activist who now works for the National Federation of Independent Business, "who needs enemies?"

USTL's problem with Bordonaro is that he has refused to sign the organization's term-limits declaration, which asks candidates to pledge that they will not serve more than three two-year terms in the House and two six-year terms in the Senate. "I believe strongly in term limits, but I think they have to apply to everybody across the board," says Bordonaro. "I refuse to unilaterally disarm my district." On the other hand, Mrs. Capps has signed the pledge, but told the Los Angeles Times that it was "not a hard thing for me because of my age." She's sixty years old.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states cannot force term-limits on their federal officeholders, the term-limits movement has searched for a strategy to recover from the setback. "It seems like they rethink their master plan every other month," says one critic, who is a term-limits supporter.

Shortly after the 1995 decision, USTL called for a constitutional convention to enact term limits. That idea was a non-starter. USTL then briefly flirted with the idea of multi-member congressional districts. Jacob personally advocated a bill introduced by Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.) that came right out of the Lani Guinier playbook, allowing cumulative voting and other multi-member districting arrangements.

Next, USTL turned to so-called informed-voter laws. They require secretaries of state to identify on the ballot candidates who have not promised to vote for term limits with the notice, "Disregarded Voter Instruction on Term Limits." USTL invested heavily in this strategy, and nine states passed such initiatives in 1996. California may do so in June. But term-limit activists won't spend a penny more on them, partly because these laws are likely to be struck down by the courts, and partly because activists now favor still another idea: politicians publicly pledging to limit their terms in office.

"The central element is to change term limits from a comprehensive proposal to a personal pledge," Jacob wrote in a September 1997 memo announcing USTL's new strategy. This year, USTL will ask every candidate for Congress to sign the pledge. Along with ALT, it will spend millions attacking those, like Bordonaro, who won't.

"The fundamental problem with the term-limits people," says one conservative in Washington, "is that they keep on changing their tactics -- and then treat those who disagree with them on tactical matters as apostates." USTL and House Republicans continue to trade recriminations over who deserves the most blame for failing to pass a term-limits amendment to the Constitution last spring. Meanwhile, several Republicans who support six-term limits for the House have come under ruthless attack from USTL, which insists on a three-term rule. "They're absolutely inflexible," complains Cleta Mitchell. "No good deed goes unpunished."

THE term-limits movement emerged out of the frustration many voters felt in the early 1990s with a Congress of seemingly permanent incumbents. Its first major success came in 1990 when California passed Proposition 140. By 1995, 20 other states had approved their own initiatives. The courts have voided the federal portions of these laws, but not the sections applying to state officials. Thousands of municipalities, including eight of the country's ten biggest cities, also have limited the terms of their officeholders. These accomplishments represent the main legacy of the term-limits movement, at least so far.