Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Republican from the state’s southernmost county, recently speculated it may be time for Ohioans to reconsider term limits on General Assembly members. He’s right.
More than 30 years after voters added term limits to the Constitution seeking to prevent an entrenched political class from ruling the Statehouse, it’s evident they’ve mainly succeeded only in empowering special interests to sway the General Assembly’s changing cast of characters.
Those downsides, and the way lawmakers work the system as a never-ending game of musical seats simply by changing chambers, have exposed term limits’ empty promises — as we editorialized as recently as August.
It’s time that Stephens and other legislative leaders who recognize the problems begin to put their political heft in the service of reforms.
Legislative term limits were added to the Ohio Constitution by a 68% vote on the issue in the November 1992 general election. The real targets were 20-year Ohio House Speaker Vernal G. Riffe, a Scioto County Democrat, and what had become the 22-year Ohio House majority (1973 through 1994) that Riffe and his caucus won and maintained.
Riffe, speaker since January 1975, retired in December 1994 as the GOP caucus led by Reynoldsburg Republican Jo Ann Davidson prepared to take over the House beginning in January 1995.
But term limits had nothing to do with the GOP victory or Riffe’s retirement; instead, a 1991 Republican gerrymander of General Assembly districts was a key factor, and Riffe, fatally ill, only lived for two years into retirement.
In a December sit-down with Statehouse reporters, Stephens said, without specifics, that he would support a constitutional amendment to change term limits.
Term limits now restrict a state representative to four consecutive two-year terms (eight years) and a state senator to two consecutive four-year terms (also eight years). But they don’t prevent a lawmaker from claiming another consecutive eight years if they’re able to run and win in the other chamber, presuming there’s an available vacancy and the requisite residency requirements can be met. A lawmaker otherwise has to sit it out for four years before running in the same chamber.
Stephens said, and he’s correct, that term limits severely constrain Statehouse experience. Contrast the limited tenures of legislators to an essentially permanent executive-branch bureaucracy and an equally permanent (and relentless) army of special-interest lobbyists who know state law and the state budget in every mood and tense, thanks to decades of Statehouse experience.
In his story on Stephens’ December comments, cleveland.com’s Andrew J. Tobias noted that Stephens supports term limits himself — and won’t be term-limited out of the House until December 2026, assuming he’s re-elected this November.
But the current House speaker rightly called attention to the demands term limits place on a high-turnover legislature:
“You come in as a state representative (in January),” Stephens said. “You’ve got (a) $100 billion … budget to figure out in six months (by July 1). And you don’t know where the bathrooms are. And you’re trying to do that, and then (in) less than a year, you’re running for election. It makes it very difficult to have that stability.”
Yes, the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission supplies members of the General Assembly with a flood of facts and figures on state finances and on the potential effects of proposed state laws. But for the policy context, the likely effects of a measure, a legislator must rely first on his or her knowledge and experience with previous legislation and debates. And that’s precisely the challenge.
Absent extensive experience in hearings and debates on proposed legislation and expenditures, the executive branch – state government’s permanent bureaucracy – and the Statehouse’s lobbying army become the default experts. And the bureaucracy and the lobbies have their own interests to tend.
Constitutionally, that’s also distorting: It’s members of the Ohio House and state Senate who should have the public interest first in mind.
Still, the case against term limits, or for modifying them, will be a hard sell. Intuitively, if superficially, term limits seem like a sure-fire way to check-and-balance incumbent legislators.
But what legislative term limits really do is limit voters, who aren’t able to re-elect those legislators who prove responsive to their districts and focused on the public interest. In other words, they handcuff voters, not officeholders — something that’s particularly ironic in Ohio.
The Ohio Constitution says, “all political power is inherent in the people,” but it can’t be if, because of term limits, a voter is no longer free to re-elect the lawmaker they like.
