Coming to Terms

Ten years of term limits in Augusta and the debate has now narrowed enough to identify the problem. It wasn’t a lack of turnover among typical legislators, a sense that lawmakers were out of touch with constituents or the fact that the capital was short on fresh ideas. It was leadership, according to discussions held recently over bills to modify or remove the term-limits law, leadership that stayed too long and ruled too strong. How many leaders did this? Well, a couple anyway. Or was it just one?

The reasons to support eight-year term limits seemed obvious a decade ago: legislative arrogance was cited, and distinctions were not made among the Legislature generally and specific leaders. They were all expendable and eight years seemed like plenty of time. Now, having had five different House speakers in 10 years, the shortcomings of this time limit – which were pointed out then – are easily apparent now.

That’s why a change to a maximum of 12 years from the current eight is warranted. The added time gives leadership a chance to learn enough about how state government functions and then apply what they learned to Maine’s benefit. This is true not only for the House and Senate’s top leaders, but also for chairmen of committees, who need experience with large, complex budgets to understand what changes are required and which should be blocked.

Matthew C. Moen and Kenneth T. Palmer, both political-science professors, examined the effects of term limits last year in the Maine Policy Review from the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at UMaine. They note the cure of ’93 had serious side effects still being felt today.

For instance, in the early ’90s, the average House chairman had served eight years on the committee he or she headed; by 2000, the average tenure was less than four years. And most committees are processing more bills than before term limits, although an effort by leadership in the last session helped dampen the increase. The same is true of the number of bills carried over into the next session. Further, the committees are recommending against a greater percentage of bills than before, which may be due to the increased number of repeat bills that inexperienced lawmakers introduce unaware that similar legislation was rejected just a few years earlier.

Professors Moen and Palmer may have spotted a more important trend – an increase in divided committee reports. “As novices stream into the institution, they may be less willing to accept traditional political norms of compromise and conciliation,” they write, “as the experienced members leave the institution, the norms may not be as easily transmitted. … It is plausible that heavily burdened committees are more fractured.” One result of this is the increased number of bills that receive only one committee vote – with the single vote being enough to keep a bill alive and receiving all the attention that a bill with an actual chance of passing the full Legislature would receive.

Maine is the only state in the Northeast with term limits, which were a handy tool 10 years ago to bludgeon leadership but now are not nearly so useful. Maine should either raise the limits to 12 years, thereby making the effects of the limits less important, or get rid of them altogether.

States are often said to be the laboratories of democracy. Scientists often say they learn more from failed experiments than successful ones. The Maine laboratory has just had a really interesting learning experience.