Rob : When we come back on the other side, Scott Tillman joins us from US Term Limits on the case for term limits and how that would change things. Stay with The Schilling Show back in just a moment. All right, The Schilling Show continues on this wild Wednesday. More time for open phones in the top of the next hour. I’m having reports of some people having trouble getting through on the phone lines. If you are, would you please send me an email and let me know so we can get our tech people on that. Pleased to welcome to The Schilling Show, Scott Tillman of US Term Limits. Today’s topic, The Case for Term Limits. Scott, welcome to The Schilling Show. Thanks for joining us today.
Scott Tillman: Well, thank you for having me.
Rob : Could you tell us about US Term Limits?
Scott Tillman: So US Term Limits got started back in the ’90s. There were a lot of states that were using their local citizen initiative process. That’s not something available in Virginia, but in some states you’re allowed to go out and gather signatures. And if you get enough signatures, you can put an issue on the ballot. And term limits, of course, is getting more and more popular through the ’80s. And a lot of states, there was 20 some states that put term limits for the congressional delegation on the ballot and people voted for it in all those states.
And we were well on our way to having term limits. And then the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, said that any amendment or any term limits need to come through the amendment process to the Constitution, which means either it has to be done by Congress or through an Article 5 movement by the states. So we’re working on both of those processes now. And we have been for several years. But we originated back in the ’90s. And we found that a lot of candidates like to talk about term limits, but then, like turkeys at Thanksgiving, when they get into office, they don’t want to support term limits. They realize that it’s coming after them. So even despite 83%, 84% of the most recent polling, it’s a very heavy lift in Congress, which is where we need to move it.
Rob : Yeah, this is interesting because I had this vague recollection a couple years ago that term limits actually were a thing in the ’90s. And then I went back and looked and saw, in fact, that your organization was the party to that lawsuit.
Scott Tillman: Yes, we were. And it was very disappointing. But the court is different now. And we hope if we find a way to get back into that situation where we’re at the court, that they would come down differently.
Rob : What was the legal sticking point, if you could, on the majority complaint about it? Was there a particular issue? Because a 5-4 split is as close as it gets. So you obviously had several people that were on your side.
Scott Tillman: We did. And the only one who’s still there who was on that court is Justice Thomas. And he actually wrote the dissent in that. But the sticking point was qualifications. They say that term limits, saying that somebody wouldn’t be able to appear on the ballot for a congressional election, was adding an additional qualification. They said since the only qualifications in the Constitution are age and that you have to be a US citizen, I think that you have to be a US citizen.
But since it wasn’t expressly listed in the qualifications in the Constitution, that we couldn’t go ahead and do it state by state. And that was the rationale to block it. Now, most of those initiatives did not block a person from running a write-in campaign. And since then, we’ve seen several successful write-in campaigns by people running for Congress. So we think that going back that those arguments wouldn’t necessarily hold up.
Rob : We’re talking with Scott Tillman of US Term Limits, 977-1070 is the phone number. You mentioned Article 5 Convention of States. And we had a listener who’s actually involved on a local level with the Convention of States. So tell us what would happen in that instance as opposed to another approach to a constitutional amendment.
Scott Tillman: Well, there’s a discussion about how a convention would work. But in reality, it’s never going to get to a convention. There’s been several different amendments that started out as states passing resolutions calling for an Article 5 Convention, specifically the direct election of senators and congressional or I’m sorry, the repeal of prohibition and then presidential term limits. Those all started with states passing Article 5 resolutions. And then what happens is as you start to creep up in that number, you need to get two-thirds, which is 34 states.
When you get higher in that number, Congress all of a sudden sees the light and decides that we want to jump in front of this, and especially on this issue of term limits. They’re not going to let the state legislators, most of whom would be trying to get their jobs in Congress, decide that, well, we’re going to make these retroactive and set them very reasonable timeframe to get you out of there so I can run for your seat. So what they’re going to do is they’re going to jump in front of it. We just need to get enough leverage and get enough states, which is probably around 28 to 30.
Scott Tillman: We currently have 13. 28 to 30 states to pass that, and then Congress will see the light. And we also have a pledge program, which is, you found my name on a press release, and we had a couple of Virginia candidates recently who are running for US Senate sign our pledge. And we have currently in the House 126 pledge signers. Now, to pass the House of Representatives to get an amendment, you need 290, but we have others that are favorable and others that will see the light once the rating is on the wall.
Rob : Let’s talk about the opponents. What are they saying are the drawbacks to term limits?
Scott Tillman: They say that you lose institutional knowledge and that you take away people’s right to choose who they want to go for. But we can see easily that people want term limits. And you’re giving them more options, not less, especially we see this in term limit states. You get increased voter turnout because you have more candidates doing more outreach to people. But then especially when it comes to the institutional knowledge, we can look at Congress today and say, what are they using their institutional knowledge to do? And it appears that they’re using their institutional knowledge to line their selves and their friends’ pocketbooks and to just go along to get along, to keep riding the popularity in the attention train.
They get a lot of perks from being in Congress. They get a lot of special things, and they like that. So the idea that somehow we’re going to lose institutional knowledge while the most experienced Congress in history, the number of years served in there goes up every year, has run this country how many trillions of dollars into debt now?
Rob : Yeah, a lot.
Scott Tillman: The institutional knowledge seems to be all bad.
Rob : Yeah, unfortunately. We’ve got just a couple minutes left with Scott Tillman, US Term Limits. So a lot of people say, we had a caller earlier in anticipation of this, at least he used to hold the position that, well, the elections are the best term limit, and I’d love for you to respond to that.
Scott Tillman: So there’s a lot of ways that incumbents have an advantage. And if we want to have fair elections, there’s certain things that you need to… and when I say fair elections, I’m not talking about stop the steal or any of that kind of stuff. I’m just talking about straight fair elections. If you have an incumbent who’s got the ability to go out and fundraise from the list that he has built up over a long time, as well as when he goes and asks people for money, they think, well, if I need something passed by this guy, I don’t want to tell him no. And then you have opponents who go and ask people and they say, well, I don’t want to be seen supporting somebody who is against the guy who’s there because he’s got such an advantage.
They also do what’s called franking, where they spend taxpayer dollars to do citizen outreach. And there’s legitimate reasons why they should be reaching out to their constituents about different legislation that passes, but it always is very beneficial to them. They also have a lot of access to… they can get an op-ed published very quickly.
Scott Tillman: They can get on Fox News. They can get on CNN just with a phone call, and opponents can’t do that. So there are significant advantages to being the incumbent. And unless you equal that playing field, there’s always those incumbent advantages. So you can’t have that fair election. And there’s other issues.
I like to think of fair elections like a three-legged stool where you have the issue of gerrymandering, you have the issue of money in politics, and you have the issue of incumbent advantage. And without those three things, you can’t really have a fair election system. So we’re working on the incumbent advantage portion of that three-legged stool. And what we’re trying to do is make sure that every so often on a predictable schedule, you know that this seat is going to be open, and then you get a lot more people who will run and go and attempt to serve and do the voter outreach and get people more engaged and involved with the election process.
Rob : This one comes in from listener Aaron. He said, “I’m generally in support, but one criticism I’ve heard is that term limits would result in lame duck terms where the elected person could do whatever he or she wanted without any fear of being held accountable by constituents in the final term.” Is this a legitimate concern?
Scott Tillman: They’re doing that now. And what term limits does is it puts a sunset on their time in office. So if a person runs for Congress and they’re going to go and tell people when they leave that, I was in Congress at this time, they’re going to get asked, well, what did you accomplish? Well, right now they don’t accomplish anything. And actually the incentive is quite perverse in the opposite way.
If Congress solves a problem, they can no longer campaign and fundraise on it and get people excited about the issue. So while there might be palatable solutions to the general public for responsible guest worker programs and immigration reform, responsible, reasonable, palatable abortion restrictions and things like that, they don’t have any incentive to propose reasonable things that are palatable to the public. They have incentive to not, so they can call the people from the other party names and go out and fundraise and say, this person just doesn’t like people from different countries. This person just wants to let in people to vote. And they use that. They have no incentive to solve the problem.
But if you put a sunset on their time and then when they leave, they’re going to have to go and tell people what did you accomplish, and they can just say, well, I was there and I talked about doing these things, but I never took any action on them or I never worked across the aisle to get action on them, it’s not going to sound very good. So it gives them a huge incentive to actually work across the aisle to solve the problems facing our nation.
Rob : If people want to get more information, Scott Tillman on US Term Limits, tell us how, please.
Scott Tillman: Well, you can find us on all the regular social media platforms, and if you put in term limits, you’ll get them. Also, termlimits.com, and feel free to reach out to us there, and we’ll have somebody get back to you with Facebook, Twitter, different places like that. We’re on all the major platforms.
Rob : Scott Tillman, thanks very much for joining us today on The Schilling Show.
Scott Tillman: Thanks, Rob.