The Thicket at State Legislatures

Term Limits for Committee Chairs?

by Karl Kurtz

Earlier this week I testified before the Pennsylvania House Speaker's Commission on Legislative Reform on the subject of term limits.  The commission, which is made up of 12 members from each party, was established by Rep. Dennis O'Brien, the Republican who was elected speaker after House Democrats, who hold a 101-100 margin over the Republicans, were unable to elect their own speaker.  The commission recommended approximately 32 changes in House rules at the beginning of the session and saw 31 of them enacted by the body.  Now it is taking a more in-depth look at four issues: open records, the size of the legislature, campaign finance and term limits.

Term limits are on the agenda in part because Gov. Ed Rendell has mentioned that he thinks that they would be a good idea for the legislature, although he has not pushed a specific proposal.  After hearing testimony and holding a committee discussion (but no votes), the co-chairs of the commission, Rep. David Steil and Rep. Joshua Shapiro, said that their sense of the committee was that there is not strong support for term limits for legislators (which would require a constitutional amendment approved in two separate sessions of the legislature and a vote of the people).

However, it was apparent in the commission meeting that there is considerable interest in the possibility of term limits for committee chairs.  One of the reasons for this is that  the Pennsylvania House has one of the stronger seniority systems in the country because the rules require that the chairs of 23 of the 24 standing committees must come from among the most senior members of the majority party, excluding the seven top leaders.  The only exception to this rule is the appropriations committee.  Seniority does not govern which committee the veteran members get to chair, as the speaker and majority leader can make those decisions.  As one member of the commission put it, "Seniority guarantees you a committee chairmanship but not necessarily a good one."  The practical result of this system, combined with historically low rates of turnover in the Pennsylvania legislature, is that members typically serve more than a dozen years before they become a committee chair.

Knowing in advance that I would be asked about practices in other legislatures regarding committee chairmanships, I boned up on the subject by talking with Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution, Alan Rosenthal of Rutgers University and our own NCSL resident rules and procedure expert, Brenda Erickson.  Here is a summary of what I learned.

Term Limits in the News

by Karl Kurtz

There have been two interesting articles on term limits in recent days.  On Sunday, the Washington Post ran "After Adopting Term Limits, States Lose Female Legislators."  The story quotes former Ohio House speaker JoAnne Davidson on the loss of women in the Ohio Legislature (down from 32 before term limits to 23 after) and goes on to say:

"It's been hard to keep the numbers up," said Davidson, who was Ohio's first female House speaker and now is co-chair of the Republican National Committee. "We pick them up by ones and twos and threes. When all of a sudden you have 40-some seats open, you don't have as many women step up as men to replace them."

Of women, she said: "They're harder to recruit. They're harder to convince to run."

The phenomenon Davidson described holds true across the country, where term-limited legislatures with rising numbers of women are the exception. In fact, gains during the past 12 years have been slightly greater in states without term limits, according to political scientist Gary Moncrief.

"The evidence has shown that it has had absolutely no positive effect at all," said Moncrief, a Boise State University professor who predicted 15 years ago that term limits would increase representation for women. "The logic was impeccable, the empirical evidence not at all. The problem is there aren't as many women running as we expected."

Unfortunately, the Post story doesn't recognize that Moncrief's research was part of the Joint Project on Term Limits, a four-year national study of the effects of term limits conducted jointly by NCSL, the Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation.  (See the term limits category of The Thicket for more on this subject.)

The second article of note is a very nicely crafted plea in the Philadelphia Daily News, "Don't dumb down the Legislature," by Pennsylvania Rep. Daylin Leach against Gov. Ed Rendell's proposal to impose term limts on the Pennsylvania Legislature.  Here's an excerpt:

Polling Nuggets from California

by Tim Storey

The nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released an extensive statewide poll of Californians yesterday that is chock full of eye-opening findings.  One conclusion should probably come as no surprise.  A proposal to modify legislative term limits in California may be a tough sell.    According to the poll, 68% of likely voters think term limits have been a good thing, and 64% oppose a preliminary proposal to change the provisions of California legislative term limits.  However, the poll question did not make it clear to respondents that the proposal would actually shorten the overall amount of time one person could serve in the legislature.  A joint study by NCSL, the Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation titled Coping With Term Limits and released last August found that term limits have generally had negative effects on the institution of the legislature.   (The report is not available online but you can read about its findings in an earlier Thicket Post here and order a hard copy here).   Apparently, studies akin to NCSL's have not had much influence on average Californians who still believe term limits are good public policy. 

The poll also reports that 41% of California adults approve of the job of the Legislature while only 42% disapprove.  Believe it or not, those are good numbers compared to previous polls on legislative job ratings.  Redistricting reform does not appear to be a burning issue for  folks on the left coast.  Only 37% of those polled think the redistricting process needs "major changes" with 27% saying minor changes would suffice.  In contrast, 71% of respondents say the California health care system needs "major changes" with 16% calling for "minor changes."

Term Limits Weaken Ties between Congress and State Legislatures

by Karl Kurtz

Because I am one of the NCSL liaisons to the California Legislature, I was asked by our Washington, D.C. office (the arm of NCSL that represents the states before the federal government) a few weeks ago to identify California legislators who are close to two members of Congress and therefore might be able to influence their actions.  It turned out to be a much more difficult task than I had anticipated.  My contacts in California had a hard time in coming up with legislators who have strong personal connections to these particular members of Congress.

Why is this so?  It turns out that this is an unexpected and little noted side effect of term limits for two reasons. 

First, the majority of the members of the California congressional delegation have previously served in the state legislature, so they ought to have a lot of friends back in Sacramento.  But with six- and eight-year term limits in the state Assembly and Senate, respectively, the turnover of legislators means that members of Congress not far removed from serving in the legislature soon lose touch with those in the state capitol.  One of the members of Congress with whom we want to connect served in Sacramento several decades ago, so all of his personal friends are long gone.

Second, term-limited legislators who want to remain in politics are more likely to challenge sitting members of Congress than are non-term-limited legislators who can bide their time until there is an open congressional seat.   This is true both across parties and within the same party.  Since term limits were imposed in California, there have been three challenges of incumbent congressmen by termed-out state legislators in Democratic primaries--Hilda Solis vs. Marty Martinez, Juan Vargas vs. Bob Filner and Joe Nation vs. Lynn Woolsey.  The first was successful, the second two were not.  Such events, rarely heard of before term limits, are likely to cause incumbent members of Congress to look over their shoulders at state legislators and perhaps to keep their distance from the politicians back home.

Is this effect confined to California.  It may just be more observable in a state with 53 members of Congress, and California's shorter-than-most (along with Arkansas and Michigan) lifetime term limits may exaggerate the effects.  Two separate academic articles in a recent issue of State Politics and Policy Quarterly (only abstracts available at the link) by Jeff Lazarus of Georgia State University and Jennifer Steen of Boston College document the fact that term-limited state legislators more frequently challenge incumbent members of Congress than do non-term-limited lawmakers. 

We would like to hear from other term-limited states on this question.  Just add a comment below or send us an email.

In the grand scheme of things, the ties between members of Congress and state legislators are not the most important quality of representative democracy or America's version of federalism.  But to us at NCSL, who rely on these relationships for much of our influence on federal policy issues in Washington, D.C., it's a big deal.

Most Anti-Government Ballot Measures Headed to Defeat?

by Jennie Bowser

Frustration with government is evident in the collection of measures on statewide ballots tomorrow:  at least 14 measures in 11 states aim at curbing government power through limiting terms, reining in the judiciary, limiting taxes and spending, or restricting government’s right to regulate land use. 

Here’s a run-down on what recent polls are showing on the anti-government ballot measures:

With a vote that could be the nail in the coffin of the term limits movement, Oregon’s legislative term limits proposal is headed toward failure – 57 percent of those polled last week said they would vote no.  And since Oregon votes entirely by mail, it’s likely that many ballots had already been completed and mailed at the time the survey was conducted.

Coping with Term Limits

by Karl Kurtz

The release of our study on the effects of term limits, Coping with Term Limits, two weeks ago has drawn considerable press, including an editorial in today's USA Today, Let Voters Decide.  Most of the coverage has been straightforward and fair, largely based on our press release and occasionally including an opposing point of view or a comment by a term limits expert in the state where the story appeared.

Two of the reports on the study--the opposing point of view in USA Today by Paul Farago, spokesman for Restoring Oregon's Term Limits, and by Tennessee blogger billhobbs.com--though, have accused NCSL of being "a trade association for incumbents" (Farago) and therefore unreliable on this subject and of overstating our case that term limits have not resulted in greater representation for minorities and women.  I want to clarify the record on both of these points.

Our purpose in conducting the study was not to argue for or against term limits but rather to assess their impact on legislatures more than a decade after they first appeared on the scene.  Our bias, shared by our partner organizations on the Joint Project on Term Limits--the Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation--is in favor of strong legislatures and an effective system of representative democracy.  If we had found that term limits strengthened legislatures or made them more effective, we would have reported such facts.  Moreover, an unbiased group of a dozen academic political scientists helped us design and conduct the project.

On the subject of the representation of women and minorities it is important to note that  Coping with Term Limits is a 33-page summary of a much longer book, Institutional Change in American Politics: The Case of Term Limits, to be published in 2007 by the University of Michigan Press, and our press release was a 2-page summary of the summary.  As we condensed this information, it was sometimes difficult to impart the subtlety, nuance and appropriate qualifications of our findings that are contained in the full-length manuscript.

The original chapter on the composition of legislatures covering the subject of women and minorities was written by political scientists Gary Moncrief of Boise State University, Lynda Powell of the University of Rochester, and Tim Storey of NCSL.  In an effort to clarify our findings and to provide other source material that readers can go to, excerpts from their chapter, "Composition of Legislatures," in the full-length book are included below the jump.

It may not be Rocket Science, but it's Still Hard Work

by Karl Kurtz

I loved this description of the complexity of legislative work in an editorial in the Kennebec Journal about the value of legislators attending  NCSL's annual meeting:

This is what lawmakers do when they get to the State Legislature:

They sponsor, write and deliberate over bills that are written in language that only lawyers understand. They consider matters of enormous importance, with which many of them are unfamiliar: health insurance; federal educational mandates; workmen's compensation; takings law; the appropriate way for the criminal justice system to handle sexual predators; the chemistry of clean water; how much oxygen fish need to thrive; the effect of global competition on Maine's remaining natural resource industries; how tall windmills should be to avoid killing birds; what training chiropractors should have if they want to call themselves acupuncturists.

Maine's part-time, non-professional legislators deal with a mind-boggling array of complex issues, for which many of them have little training. From considering obscure issues of criminal law to mastering -- or not -- the byzantine complexity of the state's budget, they work hard, get paid little for their efforts and, because of term limits, a new crop of them is always being forced to learn the issues and parliamentary maneuvers necessary to be an effective legislator.

"Maine's oldest newspaper" gets it!

Minimum Wage for Ex-Legislators?

by Karl Kurtz

In an AP story appearing in the Contra Costa Times, Bipartisan Fever Grips Legislature, on how California Democratic legislative leaders have reached a  deal with Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to raise the minimum wage to $8 an hour, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata says, "The cynics have wondered why we were doing this in an election year, and I remind people that [Speaker] Fabian [Nunez] and I are termed out in two years, and $8 an hour sounds pretty damned good to us."

Brain Drain or Term Limits Work Just Fine?

by Karl Kurtz

Last Sunday's Los Angeles Times contains two somewhat contradictory articles on the impact of term limits in California.  A news story, Term Limits Add up to Brain Drain in Capitol, documents high levels of turnover in legislative staff, especially among committee consultants,  in Sacramento since the imposition of term limits. The article suggests, among other things, that the influence of lobbyists has increased as a result of the combination of legislator and staff turnover.

An op ed piece by University of California Irvine political scientist Mark Petracca, one of the few political scientists who supports the idea of term limits, published an op ed piece in the same edition entitled Term Limits Work Just Fine, Thank You.  Petracca's article is aimed at a proposal to repeal term limits for the Los Angeles City Council, but it draws on the experience of the California Legislature.  One of his arguments is that lobbyists couldn't possibly have gained power because the city council was already "plundered [or] controlled by influential lobbyists" before term limits.  This, he says, is one of the reasons why term limits were passed in the first place.

Leaving aside the curious case of a political scientist who assumes that intended consequences are the ones that result from an institutional reform, I'd like to add some perspective to these two articles and set the record straight on a factual error in Petracca's piece.

Few Primary Election Surprises

by Tim Storey

Tuesday was the second largest primary day of 2006 with six states holding state primary elections plus federal primaries in New Jersey and Mississippi.  Unlike a few earlier primary Tuesdays this year, yesterday produced no bombshell results in legislative races. 

A few incumbents fell to intra-party challengers in Alabama, Iowa, Montana and South Dakota including Iowa Senator Maggie Tinsman, first elected in 1988 and a member of NCSL's Executive Committee.  In South Dakota, four incumbent GOP Senators (including six-term Senator J.P, Dunaphan) who had voted against the highly publicized law to ban most abortions lost to challengers.  More South Dakota legislators had primary opponents than any other election in the past decade.