This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 6, 2012 - Steve Tilley, who recently stepped down as speaker of the Missouri House, supports the state’s legislative term limits. The Republican optometrist from Perryville figures he would never have gotten to be speaker without it.
Missouri’s term limits, put in place by voters in 1992, swept away the tradition of state House speakers staying in office for years – even a decade or more.
Over the past 20 years, the tenure in the House’s top post has become two years or less.
State Rep. Chris Kelly, D-Columbia, who served in the House before term limits (and has returned for another round under them), acknowledges that term limits do bring “revitalization” as a new group of freshmen members, often young, roll in every two years to replace the veterans who maxed out after eight years in the chamber.
Trouble is, adds Kelly (a term limit opponent), “the talent to make the decisions is not there" because most House members “don’t have enough time to develop the skill."
Kelly and Tilley were part of a four-person panel that arguably was the star attraction at Saturday’s all-day conference on term limits, held at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The panel also included outgoing state Sen. Robin Wright-Jones, D-St. Louis, and former state Sen. Franc Flotron, R-Chesterfield.
The event was presented by the university’s Center for Ethics in Public Life, in cooperation with the university's public policy administration program and the Department of Political Science. The event’s nine cosponsors included the St. Louis Beacon.
The conference showcased supporters and opponents, academics and activists on both sides of the issue. They included Paul Jacob, the former president of U.S. Term Limits, a national group that helped provide the muscle and cash that helped get the limits – generally eight years apiece in the state House and Senate – before Missouri voters.
Greeks, Romans differed over term limits
Most of the 15 states that have legislative term limits, including Missouri, approved them in the 1990s.
Some academics have speculated that the wave of term-limit approvals was tied to the unsettled economic times. But Jacob believes Americans began focusing more in the 1990s on how their state and local governments operated because the longstanding Cold War with the Soviet Union had just ended, eliminating what he called “the enemy abroad.”
Greg Upchurch, a St. Louis lawyer who was among the leaders of the 1992 effort, said those who support term limits are "just trying to keep the system free flowing."
“The No. 1 reason people liked term limits is that it allowed more people to get involved in the process,” Jacob continued. He asserted that term limits also can combat “the intellectual corruption of being in that ‘bubble’ year after year” and curb corruption as well.
The chief reason term limits is still discussed in states like Missouri 20 years later, contended Jacob, is "the folks who didn't like term limits still don't like term limits and won't move on."
Thad Kousser, a professor from the University of California, explained that term limits was an issue even in ancient times – with the Greeks imposing it on their Council of 500 while the Romans eschewed it for their ruling Senate.
Aside from the 15 states with term limits, more than a dozen others had tossed them out – often via the courts. Voters in Mississippi have twice rejected term limits at the polls.
Missouri is among only six states that impose “lifetime” term limits while the other nine states have term limits that apply only to “consecutive” terms, meaning that the officeholder can leave office, then come back and start over.
Have term limits curbed General Assembly's power?
Kousser quipped that the word “limits” stands for “Let Incumbents Mosey Into The Sunset.”
But other speakers argued that the cost has been high. They assert that the Missouri General Assembly has been transformed from a body that included veteran legislators expert in state operations, finances and programs into a group of 197 short-term lawmakers who lack the knowledge -- and often substitute politics for policy.
“In a complicated government, knowledge is power,” said former state Sen. Franc Flotron, a Republican from Chesterfield who now heads a successful lobbying firm that focuses on the General Assembly.
Flotron was one of the legislative veterans forced out in 2000 and 2002 when term limits finally kicked in. Since then, he said, “the power effectively has moved to the executive branch and the judicial branch. It has moved to the bureaucracy. It also has moved to political consultants.”
Flotron agreed that before term limits, some veteran legislators may have been too attached to power.
And Tilley acknowledged that one downside of term limits is that legislators, particularly in the House, often are less focused on their legislative jobs and paying more attention to their next political move.
Term limits, said Tilley, “makes people look to the next plateau they can hit." In fact, he added, most of his “management problems” as speaker stemmed from handling discord among House members competing for another political post.
All of the speakers, pro or con, generally agreed that Missouri’s term limits are unlikely to go away. Tilley earlier had observed he wasn’t opposed to tweaking term limits so that legislators could serve longer than eight years in one chamber. But even that change is unlikely to happen, he said.
“There’s so many things that are important out there, jobs, the economy, educational reform, things that are really marquee stuff,’’ Tilley said. “I don’t see (term limits) being a tier one issue.”
