Inexperience on the part of lawmakers was among the many reasons ascribed by political observers to the 2007 state Legislature’s bitter and debilitating partisanship, which resulted in the session adjourning without a budget.
The reason behind this inexperience? For Rep. Ray Hawk, R-Florence, and others, the answer is term limits, enacted by an overwhelming majority of Montana voters in 1992. State law currently limits public officials from seeking re-election if they have already held the office for eight years in any 16-year period.
Hawk seeks to change Montana’s term limits, and on Jan. 21 brought before a legislative committee House Bill 174, which would put the change on the ballot to let Montana voters choose in 2010 whether to amend the state Constitution to allow an elected official to serve 16 years, either as a state senator, state representative or both. The bill would not alter term limits for other elected offices.
Introducing his bill, Hawk said it would remedy the Legislature’s waning influence over state spending, resulting from inexperienced lawmakers not always knowing the right questions to ask agency heads and the governor’s budget officials, who often have decades of expertise navigating the state bureaucracy.
“This shift in power reflects the key problem with term limits that are too restrictive; they create inexperience,” Hawk told the State Administration Committee. “We no longer have a small group of long-serving legislators whose leadership and expertise can guide a largely inexperienced Legislature.”
Hawk also noted that under current law, legislators can bounce back and forth between the House and Senate every eight years, whereas under his bill, once a lawmaker serves 16 years, they are kicked out of the capitol for good.
“Sixteen years should be enough time to learn the process and effectively serve as a legislator,” he said.
So depending on one’s viewpoint, Hawk’s bill actually strengthens the concept of term limits. But not everyone was convinced.
Travis Butcher, a political activist who participated in getting the original term limits provision on the ballot in 1992, and the organizer of numerous constitutional initiatives in subsequent years, spoke against the bill on behalf of “Citizens for Eight-Year Term Limits,” which he described as a “newly founded grassroots organization.”
In states throughout the country where term limits have gone back on the ballot, voters have repeatedly chosen to leave them in place, and express widespread satisfaction with their effect, Butcher said, adding that voters should not have to return to the polls to reinforce something upon which they’ve already voted.
“They see really a breach of trust with elected officials when they put it in the Constitution, then have to go back to defend it a second time,” Butcher said.
A number of private citizens from throughout the state reinforced Butcher’s message that there is widespread support for the current term limits, and that complaints about term limits by lawmakers in the news media too often drown out public sentiment.
“There’s a lot of quotes from members of the Legislature about how bad these term limits are, and there’s never any pushback in the media,” said William Biernat of Lewistown.
Since the bill’s introduction, a national group called U.S. Term Limits, based in Fairfax, Va., has issued repeated statements opposing Hawk’s bill. And late last week, Winifred Republican Rep. Ed Butcher, Travis Butcher’s father, added his name to the group’s opposition.
“Many of the supporters of this legislation are term-limited, and it’s no coincidence. This is a transparent attempt by politicians to achieve job security in a time when Montanans are concerned about keeping their own jobs,” U.S. Term Limits President Philip Blumel and Ed Butcher said in a statement issued last week. “Ironically, the lengths that politicians will go through to repeal or extend term limits proves on its face the need for term limits.”
The State Administration Committee, as of this writing, has not taken action on the bill.