Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
May 16, 2009

What I never understood about the term limit movement is why the greatest advocates for limiting legislative terms in office call themselves Conservatives. That never made any sense to me.

One statement that I thought helps define Conservative thought is that “people must take accountability for their own actions, and take whatever comes with it.” Those are not the words of Ayn Rand or Russell Kirk. This observation comes from a 13-year-old Georgia home-schooler, Jonathan Krohn.

Young Jonathan pretty much covers my chief complaint against legislative term limits. I don’t think you have to be a Conservative to appreciate that any time you limit a constitutional right like voting, you reduce the incentive for citizens to uphold the Constitution by participating. In this case, if you reduce voter accountability, you ultimately reduce voting and diminish democracy. Tell a voter that no matter how bad a legislator is, there is no point in getting worked up about it — just wait him out. People are going to understand that their vote is even less important than it was when they had a legislator they didn’t like, and couldn’t seem to get rid of.

Maybe this is the point in time we limit how long we’re going to talk about term limits. The last time I got roped into this issue, I ended up becoming the celebrated villain in radio advertising around Michigan. Rick Cole — the evil genius in Lansing — is using your insurance money to undo the most important thing for which you ever voted: term limits. These radio ads were part of a campaign financed by the group called U.S. Term Limits. They charged that my then-employer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, was paying me to gin up a campaign to undo the will of the people by repealing the term limit amendment they had passed nearly a decade earlier. I was the evil doer of the month — worse yet from their standpoint, they called me a lobbyist — in a nationally syndicated commentary by term limit zealot Paul Jacobs. You have not lived until you see yourself described as “The Enemy of Democracy” in a nationally-syndicated newspaper column.

Here is how it started. My pal, the late Kevin Kelly, and I got into a heck of an argument one night while we were attending the 2000 annual Mackinac Island policy conference of the Detroit Regional Chamber. Kevin, the long-time chief operator of the state medical society, thought it was time we started a movement to get voters to modify — not repeal — the action that put term limits in the state’s constitution. I (then an executive at the Blues in Detroit and a chamber board member) had a different idea. I thought compromising was the worst thing we could do. I was convinced that every argument against legislative term limits led me to conclude that repealing term limits altogether was the only viable option. Any argument less, I thought, lacked sufficient integrity to make the case.

I never was very pragmatic on the issue of legislative term limits. In my earlier lives, I had been an employee in both the legislative and executive branches of government, and I came to the answer directly. I did not want anyone telling me I could not hire whomever I wanted to defend my rights in Lansing. I certainly didn’t want to be stuck with perpetual rookies representing me. After all, if some over-zealous forest ranger from the old Department of Natural Resources fines me for killing a rattlesnake in my kids’ sandbox, I want a legislator who knows how to get the ranger in line by taking a whack at the DNR budget if he has to. This might be the only way the executive branch remembers who pays the taxes in these parts before it puts some endangered specie on a list ahead of one of my kids. The issue was never much more complicated than that for me. And if that makes me sound like a Liberal, I can live with that.

So, Kevin Kelly and I, using our own money, on our own time, held a few meetings in Holiday Inn conference rooms we rented around the state. We wanted to hear what others were thinking about term limits. We took notes. The response was nearly unanimous. Most everyone who seemed interested in the issue was convinced that, sooner or later, we were all going to regret letting the term limit amendment pass, and that we needed to do something about it now.

That, of course, was part of the problem. The only people who seemed interested in the issue at that time were the people who were interested in the issue at that time — the good-government types, the lobbyists, an ex-legislator or two, and one member of the Capitol Press Corps (when we used to have a Capitol Press Corps). That fact — that only the political class cares about term limits — seems to confirm the central argument of the term limit activists who have the money behind them to slam you with negative radio ads because you dare to step onto their hallowed grounds.

I suspect that fact is as true today as it was nearly 10 years ago when I became the target of a bunch of thugs with Wichita money. No one but the shrinking political class in Michigan really cares much about term limits. There might be a reason for that. Writer Susan Demas told Phil Power’s Center for Michigan a while back that the reason most people don’t care much about term limits is quite simple. “Right now, people are worried sick about making their mortgage payments and keeping their jobs. The last thing they are thinking about is legislators who would like to hang onto theirs.”

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.