Term Limits Are Not A Silver Bullet
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a sudden uptick of activity on the Dade County GOP Facebook page with a couple of people expressing their ire over their county’s commissioners proposing another T-SPLOST question to be placed on the May general primary ballot after the last one was defeated in November of 2017.
The timing, it can be argued, is a bit quick since the measure was rejected by 57% of voters who cast ballots this past November. My advice to those who don’t want it if your elected officials don’t listen to you: vote against the additional tax proposal and then vote them out. Now, that option isn’t going to be an easy one.
The first part will require organization to urge voters to turn out and vote against the measure. The second part will involve motivated people qualifying for office, raising money, organizing a campaign, and earning votes. My recommendation is hard work..especially if you’re planning on running against an incumbent, so what are Facebook activists proposing as a solution? Term limits!
I used to be in favor of term limits. It sounds good, right? You limit the number of terms a person can serve in local/state/federal office, so you automatically get new blood. Well, yes, but we already have term limits…it’s just that they aren’t automatic. Again, it takes the work of organized people working the phones and pounding the pavement to say why their preferred candidate will do a better job than the incumbent.
If they are successful, a majority will elect the challenger. If voters are happy with their current election official, then they’ll re-elect the incumbent. Term limits are a lazy way of “fixing” a problem that can be fixed already with good organization, a good candidate, and a willingness to do the hard work. It may take one or two elections, but beating an incumbent does happen.
“Most” county offices aren’t on the ballot this year, but, depending on the county, some may be. Of course, all legislative seats and statewide offices are up for election as well as all of the US House seats. If you’re not happy with your local, state, or federal representatives, then perhaps it’s your time to step up and offer yourself up as an option to voters. You won’t know unless you try, but that’s just my opinion.
About Author
nsmith
Father. IT Geek. Former 14th District GOP Chairman (2015-2017). Former Walker GOP Chairman (2009-2013). Resident of Chamblee. American. Georgian. Conservative.
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Tim Lee is a good example. After he and the Cobb Commission sold us out to the Braves, he lost the next election.
Sadly, the damage has been done. Now we can’t pay for the police, have to close libraries, will likely see a sales tax increase, and will certainly see our property taxes go up. Thanks Braves, you corporate parasites!
One reform Republicans should push through is that SPLOST authorization votes should only occur in general elections. not primaries, not one-offs, not special elections.
Problem is SPLOST time periods are 5 years. At least every one I work with has been in five year stretches.
Here’s a list of all sales taxes, start date and end date:
https://dor.georgia.gov/sites/dor.georgia.gov/files/related_files/document/LGS/Distributions/LGS_2018_Jan_Rate_Chart_Historical.pdf
The thing about the Braves sticking it to taxpayers is that it’s what they do best.
The Braves Play Taxpayers Better Than They Play Baseball: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-atlanta-braves-stadium/
“Over the last 15 years, the Braves have extracted nearly half a billion in public funds for four new homes, each bigger and more expensive than the last. The crown jewel, backed by $392 million in public funding, is a $722 million, 41,500-seat stadium for the major league club set to open next year in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta. Before Cobb, the Braves built three minor league parks, working their way up the ladder from Single A to Triple A. In every case, they switched cities, pitting their new host against the old during negotiations. They showered attention on local officials unaccustomed to dealing with a big-league franchise and, in the end, left most of the cost on the public ledger. Says Joel Maxcy, a sports economist at Drexel University: “If there’s one thing the Braves know how to do, it’s how to get money out of taxpayers.”
Of the Braves first of these dips into taxpayers pockets in MS: “The whole deal was very much behind closed doors,” says Michael Hotchkiss, a Pearl native, then an editor at the Clarion-Ledger. “By the time it was public, the whole thing was done.”
Three of these four Braves “deals” were in Georgia. We’re No.1 for business for a reason.
Don’t forget having a GOB name is a plus, especially if your the incumbent helps keep your job because you are a good ole boy. Going to one of the big churches helps as a candidate but you need to start a while before you declare. We have had a few here just start going to a Church right when they started running. Hopefully people will start to wake up here in Dade and vote for someone that actually does research on issues and doesn’t just show up to meetings and vote how the full time chairman tells them.
Hmmm… if the only reason incumbents get re-elected is because their constituency is happy with them please explain the extremely low approval ratings in congress in contrast to the extremely high incumbent re election rate. It’s about the money… incumbents raise 3-5x more money than their challengers on average. You can argue that because they “work” harder, but I think it is more about special interests and name recognition. The financial playing field between challenger and incumbent should be level. Then you can argue the “hard work.”
Hi Ron, a lot of times it’s because people are generally happy with their Congressman or Congresswoman and blame the problem on the other 434 Members of Congress. I boiled my point down to a generality, but the sole reason isn’t necessarily because they love that incumbent. Sometimes they may not like the incumbent, but they are a more tolerable option over the challenger(s).
Yes, money can and does make a difference on getting your name in front of voters, but I’m willing to wager that local officals outside of the Atlanta metro area don’t have millions in their war chests compared to Members of Congress. They may have enough to keep their name in their constituency’s mind as well as their accomplishments to set themselves up for reelection, but I wouldn’t expect to see big checks being written to Dade County officals’ campaign accounts. However, if you have the records to show otherwise, please share.
Deep campaign pockets doesn’t always win elections. Just ask former Governor Roy Barnes who out-spent Sonny Perdue in the 2002 race for governor of Georgia and lost reelection, or Jeb(!) Bush who had a large war chest and the Bush name, which still carries some weight in Republican circles, in the 2016 GOP presidential primary and lost the Republican nod.
Like I said, being a challenger isn’t easy. You would have to hit the ground running to raise money and campaign in order to get your name out there as a challenger to the incumbent if you want to win.
While obviously not a guarantee, incumbents get reelected over 80% of the time. Being the top spender in a campaign gives you a 90% chance of victory statistically speaking. Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but the odds are definitely in the incumbent / big spenders favor. These are national statistics of course, I couldn’t find regional or state numbers. If you have that information please link it. My bet is that at local levels the money still makes the difference in most cases, it is just on a smaller scale. When the GOP denies this, your really showing how out of touch you are with the population you are supposed to represent. Americans support term limits in the range of 75-80% depending on which poll you go with. That’s a pretty solid majority. Depending on the poll 80-90% + think money has too much influence on politics. Again, solid majority. When the GOP skirts this issue, or tries to act as if it doesn’t exist we alienate a lot of voters. This skirting or denial of the problem is what makes people like me, who vote republican 90% of the time want to look for a 3rd option. We talk about the left, and how they always want more of our money because they think they are smarter than everyone and would better know how to spend it. When you deny what an overwhelming majority of Americans see, aren’t you saying the same thing?
Most Republicans want Nancy Pelosi out. I’m sure a lot of Democrats want long-tenured Republicans gone, but this discussion is turning into Congress when really the issue that spurred this is local. If you are passionate about your community and believe you can offer a positive difference than the incumbent, then offer yourself up as a choice. That’s my point. If you can’t run, then recruit someone and help organize people to cover the district or county to get them elected. Term limits sound good at face value, but we cede our responsibility of holding our elected officals accountable to a law that may or may not have our best interests at heart.
Ron, if you can spend time on here arguing for term limits, you can spend time talking to voters to help you get elected to your county commission.
Pesky facts and all… another example of that elitist attitude. Become a politician or shut up.
Politicians work for the people. Not the other way around.
“75 percent of adults nationwide back term limits for members of the House and the Senate, while 21 percent say they would vote against term limits. … even as most incumbents won their races again in November, Gallup noted.”
Seems like clear evidence that people who favor term limits want someone else’s representative to be term limited.
Do not restrict my choices because some people are lazy. That is a dangerous path to go down. As a Dem, would we want Ted Kennedy to have been term limited? John Lewis? Sam Nunn? If someone is good at what they do, let’s let them do it!
The focus should be on voter education, activism, things like that. Having candidates say things like “the government is the problem” doesn’t help. Candidates like that are obviously trying to destroy the system, usually for their own benefit, never for the benefit of the country.
I didn’t know that stepping up and offering yourself as a choice was a sign of being an elitist.
I have friends that I look up to who have worked hard to be elected and take their job representing the people from their district very seriously. They didn’t wait for someone else to come along and fix a problem. They saw that they had the talent, time, and ability to serve and to make a difference.
But hey, you don’t have to be like those people. You can continue to gripe and grouse in an echo chamber and see little yield from your efforts. Which ever path you choose, I wish you the best.
No term limits have worked out for Walker. How about those double property taxes increases lately? And now you have Businesses moving out to other places.
Well, Commissioner Whitfield ran and won 2016. A kooky country doctor came within 200 votes of winning against the former Commissioner Heiskell in 2012. Had a credible and stable candidate ran against her2012, then they probably could have won and some of the may have been avoided, but they may not. Hindsight is 20/20.
Like it or not, Commissioner Heiskell was popular from when she was elected in 2000, reelected easily in 2004 and 2008, reelected in 2012 because she was the “better” candidate over her opponent, and was defeated 2016 after she stonewalled and did some erratic things in her final term.
In most cases, well many, it is a silver bullet. I ran against an incumbent county commissioner in 2010, missed forcing the gentleman into a runoff by a mere handful of votes, 3 as I recollect. This is not to say I would have won if successful but many thought I would have. The incumbent was a fixture, like many of the public offices of my county. I was a reluctant candidate, that is to say I did not want to run but thought it a duty, to make things right, to “stop the shenanigans” I had knowledge, not evidence mind you but strong suspicions if you will, of many things that at the very best were unethical and at worst illigal. The gentleman did not act independantly. The commissioner had a following and I myself once supported the commissioner. My campaign was for the most part financed by myself. The total of contributions to my campaign were $150, $100 of which coming from outside the county, total expenditures coming to around $3000 and change. I was a good loser, in fact and in private considered that I had somehow dodged a bullet. I became friends with another candidate that year, that and I supported the candidate vociferously . That commissioner has been in office since that election and shows no sign of tiring of the seat. The incumbent that I ran against went to jail at the end of the term in which he beat me and is forbidden from running for office again or own a firearm for that matter. The odd thing is, for the most part he represented his constituency well, even though willing to sell it out. Had it not been for the jail term he may have been re elected again. He rubbed folks the wrong way and often conducted himself in an less than dignified way. A ‘weakness for Jack’ as he put it. We still speak and I maintain a grudging respect. The appointee and later elected commissioner, in my opinion, has done little to present viable solutions to the issues of the District, and has even less empathy for its constituents. It is my understanding the current commissioner will not seek reelection. My point, granted labored and a long time coming is this: In some rural Georgia counties there are only three ways to leave office; death, jail, or simply walk away.