If Congress had term limits, President Obama wouldn’t have been in the Rose Garden Monday, signing a bill that gives the Food and Drug Administration its long-sought control over tobacco products.
The bill had been stalled in Congress since the early 1990s and only made it to the president’s desk after more than 15 years of effort by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles.
For those doing the math, that’s longer than California’s six-year limit for Assembly members, eight-year limit for state senators and the 14-year limit for a combined legislative career.
When California voters approved term limits back in 1990, the stated purpose was to open up government to a wider range of elected officials, citizen legislators who would serve their term in office and then, Cincinnatus-like, put aside politics to return to the farm or insurance office or car dealership or whatever.
What the vote on Prop. 140 didn’t take into account was that many of the state’s toughest problems can’t be solved in six, eight or even 14 years. And the up-or-out mentality fostered by term limits means that legislators are moving on to a new job just when they start to become experts on one of those issues.
It’s a different world outside Sacramento. A story by Charles Homans in the May/June issue of Washington Monthly describes how Waxman, a 1970’s alumnus of the state Assembly, has picked his issues and then worked for years to make them law.
It’s not just tobacco. Since the early 1980s Waxman has worked on a variety of clean air bills, helping bring the country to a point where Congress is gearing up to put together landmark legislation on climate change.
Over that nearly 30 years, there have been five different presidents and even more congressional leaders. But Waxman has always been there, pushing his vision for health and the environment and having the luxury of time to make alliances on both sides of the aisle that keep his issues moving ahead, bit by bit.
Government has always been slow to embrace change and new ideas and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it’s also always needed politicians, Democrats and Republicans, willing to fight for the change they believe in, even if it will be years before they see a payoff.
This is not a brand-new idea. The 2006 movie “Amazing Grace” focused on British politician William Wilberforce, who worked in Parliament for 26 years to get England to ban the slave trade and then battled the rest of his life for a total ban on slavery, which happened shortly after his death in 1833.
No one’s suggesting that Hollywood is going to be making any feel-good movies about the current crew in Sacramento or the issues they are dealing with. But there are plenty of legislators on both sides of the aisle who can see their clock running out on issues they believe are important to the state.
State Sen. Loni Hancock of Berkeley, for example, has been working for public financing of political campaigns since she was first elected to the Assembly in 2002. After seeing her clean money bills die and a 2006 ballot initiative lose, she finally saw the governor sign a bill last year that would allow voters to decide whether to allow a test of public financing in the 2014 and 2018 races for secretary of state.
But Hancock will be termed out of office in 2016, so who will be there in the Legislature to push for clean money if those tests are a success?
The Prop. 89 election in 2006 showed that there are plenty of people in California who have no interest in seeing public financing happen. And term limit advocates will argue that if an issue is really important, someone else will pick it up.
But whenever an advocate walks out the term limits door, the Legislature not only loses their expertise, but also the value of any alliances they have built for an issue. Even worse, there’s the danger that legislators may believe that if a battle can’t be won in six or eight years, it’s not worth fighting.
It takes time to change minds, even – or maybe even especially — on the most important issues affecting the state and the nation. Waxman’s tobacco bill should be a reminder of that.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.