Why won’t Americans throw the bums out?

Whenever the output from elected leaders begins to look more like solid waste than sound policy, the outcry for term limits quickly follows.

Americans are in a financial panic, and what Washington has produced thus far — the $787 billion stimulus package, automakers that are still foundering despite bailout money, promises of putting people back to work by “creating” 3.5 million jobs as unemployment numbers rise — has done little more than add to the burden of debt that taxpayers must shoulder while funding lawmakers’ pet projects that have scant connection to sparking economic recovery.

I like artistically creative endeavors as much as the next person, but $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts? Seriously?

Comedy series

The “we must do something” nature of what’s being passed smacks of the rationale used by the politicians in one of my favorite BBC comedy series, “Yes, Prime Minister: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done.”

No wonder letters to the editor these days reveal an uptick in the number of writers sounding like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “Off with their heads!”

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that in 1995, when the court decided U.S. Term Limits Inc. v. Thornton. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-1456.ZO.html) Under the Constitution — the document Americans love dearly but don’t always understand — there are three requirements to run for Congress: age, citizenship and residency.

Thus it has been from the birth of our nation.

Alexander Hamilton, in response to an anti-federalist charge that the new Constitution favored the wealthy and well-born, said in a speech to the New York Assembly in June 1788, “The true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. ... This great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed.”

Binding up that liberty by adding qualifiers — such as a provision saying a member can serve only a limited number of terms — would take a constitutional amendment.

Congress has no will for that, and there’s no need, either. The country has term limits; they come around every two years in the House, and every six in the Senate. They are called elections.

Fifteen state legislatures have adopted term limits, according to U.S. Term Limits (http://www.termlimits.org), an organization dedicated to “citizen legislators, not career politicians” and the group on the losing end of that 1995 Supreme Court case. Numerous U.S. cities, including San Antonio, have term limits for mayors and council representatives. Until November 2008, San Antonio had the most restrictive plan in the country. The mayor and City Council members could serve two two-year terms, then they were out. Forever. Those restrictions eased some after the November 2008 election, when a proposition passed to extend the mayor and council term limits to four two-year terms.

Artificial limits

But think about it. Eight years of service and you’re gone, artificially limiting council members’ effectiveness. How does one, working what ostensibly is a part-time job, develop the trust and meaningful relationships necessary to effect change in so short a time?

When the good are removed along with the bad, something is wrong with the process.

It’s a mistake to think that the influence of special interests would decrease with a constant churn of rookies coming to the fore.

The faces on the City Council or in the Legislature might change, but those “special interests” remain.

There is something that can be done to correct the problems of unresponsive lawmakers.

It’s called voting.

X Jill “J.R.” Labbe is deputy editorial page editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.