State Rep. Randy Alexander’s political career got off to a promising start. In April of 2012, while running for the District 88 Arkansas House seat, Alexander signed the U.S. Term Limits pledge promising to “take no action that would aid or abet the abolition or lengthening of term limits to which elected oft cials in Arkansas are subject.”
Exactly one year later, in April of 2013, newly-minted Rep. Alexander broke his promise.
He voted with a House majority to refer to the November 2014 ballot an amendment which, if passed into law, would more than double his own termlimit from six years to 16.
It would also double State Senate term limits from 8 years to 16.
By breaking his word, Alexander appears to be embracing the long tradition of politicians who promise one thing to get elected, then do the opposite once in oft ce.
Alexander is not the only Arkansas legislator to sign the pledge and then vote for the anti-term limits amendment. Two state senators, David Sanders and Gary Stubblefield, had their votes on the measure miscounteddue to a little-known legislative process called “rolling the vote” in which absent senators are assumed to be “yes” votes. Both have expressed support for pulling the measure off the ballot due to its deceitful wording.
Perhaps Rep. Alexander was himself a victim of this deceit. If so, he wouldn’t be the only one who has been fooled.
In the Oct. 27 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the editors labeled the antiterm limits amendment its “Outrage of the Year,” and apologized to readers for having not noticed the scam earlier. It “snuck right past us,” they wrote.
While it’s uncommonfor a shady constitutional amendment to slip right past honest people undetected, the anti-term limits amendment was no ordinary bill. Its authors knew precisely how Arkansans feel about term limits and crafted the legislation with that in mind.
Term limits have a rich history in the Natural State.
Citizens placed them on the ballot in 1992 via a purely volunteer citizen initiative effort and 60 percent of voters approved them on election day. In 2004, when politicians placed a new measure on the ballot to weaken the limits, the attack lost by 70 percent of the vote. There are no polls suggesting that the peoplehave changed their mind.
Clearly, to successfully lengthen their term limits, crafty politicos need to trick voters somehow. This year the idea was fl oated to hide the anti-term limits language inside of another bill - a “shell game” of sorts - and the scam made it to the ballot.
The measure’s title, which noticeably omits the words “term limits,” is the “Arkansas Elected Oft cials Ethics, Transparency and Financial Reform Amendment.”
On the first page, the authors deliberately mislead the public by listing “establishing term limits” as one of the bill’s goals even though termlimits have been the law of the land in Arkansas since 1993. The actual text which dramatically weakens term limits is buried on page 16.
If Rep. Alexander was indeed fooled, the voters of Arkansas will surely be willing to forgive him and move on.
If not, he has breached the trust given to him by his constituents. Either way, he can only make things right with the people by honoring his pledge and joining the growing movement to have this amendment pulled off the ballot.
PHILIP BLUMEL IS PRESIDENT OF U.S. TERM LIMITS, AN ADVOCACY GROUP IN PALM BEACH, FLA.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 01/05/2014