Reports of the death of term limits are greatly exaggerated. On May 15, San Antonio voters provided a vivid demonstration that, contrary to recent national media coverage, term limits are very much alive.
Seventeen thousand local politicians in 2,900 cities, counties, and towns throughout 40 states are now subject to term limits. In 1991, San Antonio voters imposed on their city-council members a lifetime limit of two two-year terms in office, the strictest term-limit rule of any major metropolitan area in the nation.
The voters sought a more competitive political apparatus and wanted to return accountability to a system dominated by career politicians and lobbyists. Mostly, they sought an end to the huge spending and double-digit annual tax-rate increases that had become the political class’s specialty.
But term limits’ opponents never rested in their attempt to roll back the political clock. In 1996, a federal court dismissed a legal challenge and upheld San Antonio’s lifetime term limits on city council members. The conundrum for the political establishment was that the term limitation could only be changed through the ballot box.
Three months ago, San Antonio council members voted unanimously to weaken term limits through a referendum. Proposition 1 sought to expand the term limit to three consecutive three-year terms and lift the lifetime ban, thereby enabling council members to run again after sitting out a single term. Mayor Ed Garza admitted that this year’s campaign to relax the limit was simply the first step along the path to completely repealing term limits.
During the spring campaign, San Antonio’s most powerful interest groups campaigned hard against term limits. Special-interest lobbyists, business groups, labor unions, major city contractors, and the city’s daily newspaper linked arms in an anti-term-limits coalition. A veteran political consultant choreographed the slick campaign that sought to “reeducate” voters about term limits’ alleged drawbacks.
Only one group, the Homeowner Taxpayer Association, actively opposed the term-limits revision. The largely volunteer campaign possessed little money, but it did possess a passionate desire not to hand the keys to the public purse back to those proven to be poor fiscal custodians.
The anti-term-limits coalition spent $325,000. The coalition’s average contribution of $4,577 was $1,000 dollars greater than the entire amount spent by the pro-term-limit campaign. A 100-to-1 spending-ratio advantage ensured that the debate was strongly skewed in favor of Proposition 1’s passage.
The anti-term-limits campaign enjoyed all of the advantages that money can buy: political consultants, TV and radio commercials, direct-mail literature, billboards, professional phone banks, and door-to-door canvassing. The pro-term-limits campaign was limited to a website and some hand-delivered literature.
Yet, on May 15, voters overwhelmingly backed the current term-limit regime. How could this happen? Councilman Chip Haass provides an explanation: He attributes the support for term limits to “blue-collar people” unable “to understand fully how things work at City Hall.” Is there a better example of the elitist condescension that permeates the professional political class?
More logically, Richard Gambitta, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio (USTA), says the result “shows voters view the current checks on the City Council as positive.” Contrary to the political establishment’s forecast, local government has been headed in the right direction. According to research conducted by USTA’s Arturo Vega and John Bretting, overall levels of political efficacy have increased under term limits.
Most residents view their term-limited council as a vast improvement upon its careerist predecessor. For example, under term limits there hasn’t been a tax-rate increase for eleven years. Contrast this state of affairs with the fiscal abyss the city hovered over in the 1980s, when the careerists, led by Mayor Henry Cisneros, ran the show.
Term limits reward real-world experience over back-room experience. They have reformed local government in San Antonio and around the nation by replacing professional politicians with citizen legislators who participate in local government out of a sense of civic duty. The detractors are wrong: Local term limits are changing our country’s political culture and paving the way to real reform.
–Patrick Basham is senior fellow in the Center for Representative Democracy at the Cato Institute, and the author of “Defining Democracy Down: Explaining the Campaign to Repeal Term Limits.”