End Ohio Term Limits?

(This piece is my submission to the Carnival of Ohio Politics at Northwest Ohio Net, make sure to visit tomorrow to see all of the other submissions by some of Ohio's best bloggers)

My initial thought upon reading the above linked editorial was.."ARE they NUTS?"....

Let's look at this one statement:

Elections every two years for state representatives and every four years for state senators create ample accountability and a steady inflow of new blood. What term limits prevent is the formation of a core of veterans whose stature and experience give them the perspective to guide new members and see the state as a whole.

Oh really? Well let's take a look at how this "new blood" comes into office. There are 33 Senators in the Ohio Senate. Fourteen are not eligible for re-election; ten Republicans, four Democrats. Two of those not eligible for re-election next term ran unopposed; Amstutz and Mumper who are both Republicans. In the Ohio House, there are 99 Representatives, eighteen of them are serving their first term which means 81 were re-elected. Of the 18 Freshman Ohio House members, nine are Democrats and nine are Republicans; two of them Mitchell (D) and Uecker (R) ran unopposed.

Of the 81 Ohio Representatives that were re-elected, twenty of them ran unopposed. Eight Republicans and 12 Democrats faced no opponent at re-election. All of this information came from The House of Representatives, The Ohio Senate, and the Ohio Secretary of State.

Locally, Toledo has term limits though there are those like Bob McCloskey who is currently facing a court challenge to his "creative" manner of trying to skirt term limits. The Toledo Law director obviously had a different idea of what Toledo voters meant when they agreed to change the City Charter which allowed Mr. McCloskey and Betty Shultz to have the impression the City Charter did not apply to them.

Nationally the picture is not much different. In November of 2004, 401 of the 435 sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives sought reelection. Of those 401, all but five were reelected. In other words, incumbents seeking reelection to the House had a better than 99% success rate. In the U.S. Senate, only one incumbent seeking reelection was defeated. Twenty-five of twenty-six (96%) were reelected.

Back in 1995, Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute addressed among many issues, this misconception that the Akron Beacon Editorial stated above concerning their opposition to term limits:

Opponents of term limits also argue that there is plenty of turnover already. But, except for 1994, in recent years turnover has occurred largely as a result of people's retiring after long careers in politics or to seek different political offices. It is good that incumbents occasionally leave, else congressional membership would be almost permanent. Yet competitive elections, lots of them, are necessary for representative democracy. We do not have that today. As political scientist Mark Petracca observes, "Electoral competition is no longer possible in a system where the benefits and power of incumbency virtually guarantee a lifelong career as a legislator." That just 88 of 2,175 seats during the 1980s changed hands because of an incumbent's defeat is not a good thing. That 99.3 percent of unindicted congressional and state legislative incumbents won reelection during the same period is also not a good thing.

While this may have been written in 1995? There is no question that since that time period there has not been an increase in competitive elections for office.

In closing another statment from the Bandow article that I not only agree with but is part of the reason I support the Vote out Incumbents for Democracy (VOID):

The nation's Founders strongly believed in rotation in office. They left term limits out of the Constitution because they did not foresee that politics would become a career for so many people. Short term limits would remedy that mistake. Nothing is more important today than reversing the pernicious rise of a professional political class.

I think it's obvious that the current system is one of creating political careers and that extending the term limits or ending them all together as can be seen would even lessen the chance of new representation.