by Karl Kurtz
In Governing's Ballot Box blog today, Alan Greenblatt notes that it is rare in modern political history that former state legislators become president and that Sen. Barack Obama's claiming of his party's nomination for the presidency means that "...now every state legislator in the country -- all 7.400 of them -- can, like U.S. senators, look in the mirror and see a potential president."
In January 2007 in The Thicket we noted that six of 19 declared candidates for president in the 2008 election were former state legislators. How soon we forget Tancredo, Gravel, Vilsack, Thompson and Kucinich, leaving only Obama as a presidential candidate with state legislative credentials. We have also written in "State Legislators who Became President" about how 22 of 43 (51 percent) presidents are former state or colonial legislators but that there have been only five since 1900.
This reminded me that in 1994 I had proposed a fundamental change in American government that would have had the sure-fire effect of producing presidents who had backgrounds in state government: requiring that all candidates for federal office have previous state legislative experience. The piece was entitled "Reinventing Federalism" and was based on a hypothetical question that U.S. District Court Judge William L. Dwyer had asked both sides in a constitutional challenge to Washington state's limit on the terms of members of Congress: If states can make experience a disqualification for federal office (i.e. term limits), then could they impose an experience requirement as a qualification for office?
I pounced on this idea and, tongue-mostly-in-cheek, urged that "State legislatures across the nation should immediately initiate state constitutional amendments requiring six years of state legislative service for anyone who runs for the U.S. House of Represenatives, Senate or president." I spun this fantasy out into a number of variations that would strengthen American federalism by repairing damage done by the establishment of direct election of senators in the 17th Amendment. I concluded with the idea that the combination of term limits for members of Congress and experience requirements for federal office would mean that: "The best and the brightest state legislators would have someplace to go at the end of their terms, and Congress and the presidency would be replenished with experienced and committed practitioners of federalism."
Had the states taken me up on my proposal, then neither John McCain nor Hillary Clinton would have been eligible for the 2008 nomination for president. That's not a knock on them; it's only a daydream of a state legislative junkie.
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