Martin Dyckman
Confronted with a particularly mean Legislature that was accomplishing nothing good, Florida’s governor knew one reason why.
“Remarks have been made, ‘What do we care? We won’t be around,'” he said.
That was the late Lawton Chiles, commenting 20 years ago on the most immediate effect of the 1992 term limits initiative. Although the axe would not fall until after the next two elections, it was already shortening the vision of a Legislature that did not exactly have enough to start with.
That was only the beginning of a cascade of ill effects culminating last month in the petulant, unprecedented action of the House of Representatives to terminate a debate with the Senate by adjourning three days early.
When Rep. Richard Corcoran, the House’s new capo di tutti capi¸ made the motion, no rank-and-file Republican dared object. Follow-the-leader, a problematic trait even in the Legislature’s better days, became the rule because of term limits.
As opponents had warned before the referendum, the “Eight is enough” amendment inflated the influence of the lobbying corps over inexperienced lawmakers.
What wasn’t foreseen was how it would pump up the already excessive power of the House leadership.
The quality of those leaders – with some exceptions, Alan Bense being one – has suffered as freshman members have been forced to choose sides among ambitious contenders even before any of them have served in a single session. To back the wrong horse is to spend eight years voting only on other members’ bills.
Johnnie Byrd, arguably the worst speaker since the great reapportionment of 1967, got the gavel for 2003-2004 because term limits had cleared out the competition and there were no effective challengers in his relatively small group of 13 freshmen.
Byrd’s memorable political legacy was to say House members were “like sheep,” waiting for him to tell them what to do.
They joked about it, and the bolder lobbyists poked fun by wearing sheep-face masks, but it was true.
The Legislature’s presiding officers control their members through the power to appoint committees and their chairs, assign bills to committees and decide when – or more often, whether – the bills will ever be heard on the floor of the House or Senate. A member’s rewards or punishment are ordained at the outset by whether he or she joined the speaker’s bandwagon soon enough and continues to follow orders thereafter.
The easily abused leadership powers existed long before term limits, of course. What’s worse now is the inability of an independent-minded lawmaker to wait out an unfriendly regime.
The leaders of the high-achieving sessions immediately after the 1967 court-ordered reapportionment were urban representatives such as Speakers Fred Schultz of Jacksonville, Richard Pettigrew of Miami and Terrell Sessums of Tampa, whose ideas and initiatives had been stifled by the rural rulers. When the courts cashiered the Pork Chop Gang, they were able to put their experience and ideas to good use.
Conservatives who thought their agenda suffered under Schultz, Pettigrew and Sessums had their renaissance during Don Tucker‘s two terms as speaker. The progressives who waited him out returned to power in a coup against his presumptive successor. Term limits put an end to all that.
To a great degree, the limits also account for how poorly the House compares with the Senate. Of the 40 senators, 30 are former House members and three had earlier terms in the Senate. They know how things are supposed to be done and they can’t be bullied easily. Out of 120 House members, however, only nine former representatives had any more than seven years of experience – and most had less – before this year’s meltdown session.
Single-member districting – a well-motivated reform with unhappy consequences – is another reason for the Senate’s greater depth. Coupled with gerrymandering, small districts tend to produce highly parochial politicians who cater to the extremist influences, left or right, that could hurt them in primaries. Senators, on the other hand, have districts that are three times as large with correspondingly diverse constituencies.
Unrestricted campaign spending, the curse of a perverse Supreme Court, has made everything about the Legislature worse than it ought to be. On its own, Florida can’t do much about that. But it can, in theory at least, do something about term limits.
There was a healthy turnover even before “Eight is Enough.” Ever since, term limits have had the opposite effect. Gerrymandering is not the only reason why nearly half the Legislature’s incumbents were effectively unopposed last year. People who might have challenged incumbents in the old days are now choosing to wait them out.
It’s hard to conceive of a successful strategy for a constitutional amendment to repeal term limits or extend them sufficiently. The special interests that profit from a puppet Legislature would spend millions to defeat it, and it’s as easy to demagogue the wrong side of that issue as it was in 1992.
One way that might work would be to make recall elections part of the bargain. If you have a bad legislator – or governor, for that matter – why wait to be rid of him? The voters might go for that. It would be a far more effective check on abuse of power than the mindless and indiscriminate function of an arbitrary term of years.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in Western North Carolina.
