Tackle Gerrymandering and Election Reform, not Term Limits

The vast majority of Americans support Term Limits. Unfortunately, this could be counterproductive, and serve as a mere bandaid on a much more serious problem.
by Tully
(libertarian)
Saturday, September 4, 2010

According to a report from today's Fox News:

"...Finally, an issue both Democrats and Republicans agree on: term limits. Nearly 8 in 10 American voters like the idea of imposing fixed time limits in office for all members of Congress -- including their own senators and representatives.

A Fox News poll released Friday found that 78 percent of voters favor establishing term limits for Congress. That's nearly five times as many as oppose limiting the number of terms members can serve (16 percent).

Large majorities of Republicans (84 percent), Democrats (74 percent) and independents (74 percent) favor the idea..."
(source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/03/fox-news-poll-percent-favor-term-limits-congress/

Count me as one of the minority 16% who opposes Term Limits.

To be sure, there is a groundswell of dissatisfaction with Congress. Many Members of Congress are career politicians; conservatives and liberals alike are unhappy with the outcome of the health care legislation; bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit have energized Tea Partiers and new candidates alike; and Americans of all political stripes are frustrated. This frustration is expressing itself in the poll results above. But I am convinced that Congressional Term limits would make the average American's interaction with government worse, not better. Hear me out.

A typical citizen is far more likely to interact with a member of the federal bureaucracy than with an elected official. And it is far more likely that a citizen's life will be affected by the decision of an employee of a federal agency than by a Congressman's vote.

An IRS employee determines your payment plan for taxes owed. A U.S. Dept of Education employee decides whether to proceed with wage garnishment to collect on a defaulted student loan. An EPA official decides whether your company has violated emission standards. When there is an accident at your job, an OSHA employee investigates. The DOT inspects your tractor-trailer. A Social Security intake counsellor submits your disability claim. The TSA pats you down at the airport. The FDA approves or denies your potential medical treatments.

Your most common interactions with the government are with employees - employees who often have fairly secure jobs and who stay in those jobs even longer than most members of congress. And when frustrated with federal agency procedures, who do your call? Your elected officials.

Every Congressional staff member knows that constituents are more concerned with personal problem-solving than with a specific vote cast in Congress. When the 'bureaucracy' becomes intransigent and bogged down in its rules and processes, it is often an elected official who will make an effort to intervene and move things along. And those officials who have been in Congress the longest tend to be the most effective at navigating byzantine agencies whose inner workings are a mystery to most Americans.

One major problem, then, with term limits, is to lose some of the effectiveness that the elected officials have with the bureaucracies, as new officials need to master a learning curve of how those agencies operate. Term Limits will work to strengthen the role of agencies and bureaucracies in the government-citizen mix.

On the other hand, that does not mean that elected officials should be given life passes. Citizens have a ready avenue to 'throw the bum out:'

They can elect someone else.

Of course, that is easier said than done. Two parties have a stranglehold on the electoral process: in almost all 50 states, Republicans and Democrats merely need to be nominated by their party leaders, or pay a fee, to get themselves on the ballot. Independents and Third Parties, however, are effectively shut out from the process as they are required to collect thousands of signatures, meet tight filing deadlines, and then have their petitions challenged by major parties who would prefer to see them knocked out of the process (usually). Once on the ballot, money often drowns out the independent voice; and voter's fears of 'wasting their vote' drives them, even reluctantly, to the major party candidates (a phenomenon that could be reversed through instant run-off voting, and which is currently used to elect the President of Ireland and the national legislature of Australia)

But perhaps the single biggest frustration to voters exercising their choice to remove an incumbent is the gerrymandering of districts.

The "time-honored political process" (if otherwise dishonorable) of drawing district lines to effectively guarantee re-election is as old as our Republic. The problem is "built in" to the system: Legislators acting in their own self-interest vote on the new district lines that determine their odds of re-election. In spite of all the partisan bickering that characterizes national politics, Republicans and Democrats join hands in horse-trading "Safe" district lines with each other to preserve their incumbencies.

THIS is where the need for electoral reform is the greatest.

District seats should be compact geometric shapes to the greatest degree possible, given the population and geography of a state. In the early 1980s, I worked in the Cartography Department of the Nassau County (NY) Board of Elections. At that time, state legislative districts were being redrawn based on the 1980 Census. A number of individuals (myself included), using only calculators and census tract data, developed a number of redistricting scenarios that created a series of geographically rational State Assembly Districts - almost all of which were electorally "competitive," meaning that the winner was not a foregone conclusion.

All of these plans were rejected by the NY legislature which chose to draw districts that preserved incumbents and which guaranteed each party their incumbencies. One district joined non-adjacent neighborhoods by drawing district lines up one side of a highway and down the opposite side; another district connected non-contiguous communities by following the banks of a creek through a mudflat.

Take a look at the Gerogia districts on this site:

[link edited for length]

That's not pop-art. That's a map of actual Districts as adopted by the Georgia legislature after the 2000 census. Try to follow the boundaries of the 'yellow' district.

I am convinced that the process of Redistricting must be removed from the very people who have a vested interest in the outcome. Independent commissions or Judicial boards with no vested interests, operating with guidelines that prefer, where possible, districts with internal angles of less than 180 degrees and/or which follow legal/municipal lines, would be one of the most needed and significant changes to our electoral system.

Allowing political parties to design districts to preserve or enhance their power is a recipe for the creation of life-long incumbents. If we want voters to have a real say in electoral outcomes, then creating competitive, cohesive districts would be a far better option than term limits, which simply permits the party in power to anoint a successor candidate.

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The views expressed in this article are those of Tully only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Tully is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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