Last week, I described an important state government reform – direct election of the attorney general, treasurer, and secretary of state – that should have happened 100 years ago, when we began choosing U.S. senators by popular vote. It still needs to.

The problem is convincing the Legislature, which now chooses these officers, to relinquish the job to the people. That’s most likely to be accomplished by a governor who runs on the issue.

Even so, it will be a tough sell. Something that would make it persuasive to lawmakers is joining it to a second reform that’s equally necessary – the end of term limits on rank-and-file legislators.

Everyone who’s spent time at the State House over the past generation knows what a bust legislative term limits have been. Enacted by voters in 1993 in a referendum backed by U.S. Term Limits, a national libertarian group, the overwhelming vote in favor was clearly influenced by the desire to remove John Martin as House speaker. Martin had already served 19 years in the post, far longer than anyone else.

The irony is that Martin was already on the way out, felled by a ballot-tampering scandal involving his chief aide. And, as it turned out, the statute adopted in Maine didn’t set lifetime limits, so Martin continued to switch back and forth between House and Senate until voters finally retired him in 2012, another 18 years later.

But if term limits were ineffective in achieving what many believe was their chief purpose, they were all too effective in gumming up the works in both House and Senate.

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Because Maine’s citizen legislature relies on part-time lawmakers, rather than professional politicians, most of them arrive in Augusta with only sketchy knowledge of how the place works. Before term limits, legislators learned the ropes, and after a few terms were prepared to take over as chair.

In the accelerated eight-year legislative careers created by term limits, that’s all changed. House members often chair committees in their second term, and senators in their first. By the third term, it’s time to move into leadership and then, quickly, out.

One indisputable result of term limits is that since John Martin served 19 years as speaker and term limits took effect in 1996, no one has served more than a single two-year term as speaker; Mark Eves, the current speaker, is the first who might serve four years.

Why does this matter? For a small state, Maine has an unusually powerful governor’s office. The Legislature needs to provide a constitutional balance, and it can’t do so effectively when the presiding officers are constantly learning on the job.

The cure for the Martin syndrome has already been in the legislative rules for years – a six-year limit on serving in any one leadership post. Put that in statute, and you have a deal everyone can live with.

The reality is that the Legislature could repeal term limits any time it wants; in a surprising decision, the Maine Supreme Court decided it was not a constitutional matter. But lawmakers fear a voter backlash. So instead they ineptly put a question on the ballot in 2007 to extend term limits from eight to 12 years. With no campaign to change anyone’s mind, it predictably failed.

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At the height of the U.S. Term Limits campaign, which coincided with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, 21 states had legislative term limits. Since then, four state supreme courts have ruled them unconstitutional, in Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. And two overwhelmingly Republican legislatures – another irony – repealed theirs, in Idaho and Utah.

Maine is now the only state in the Northeast with legislative term limits, and in a citizen legislature, they really make no sense.

By combining the repeal of term limits with direct election of constitutional officers, a governor could win a mandate to immediately improve the functioning of state government.

Legislators would get an end to term limits, but only by giving up their prerogative to elect constitutional officers. True, most Mainers would probably still prefer term limits, but the energy is gone from that largely failed populist movement. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that only Congress can limit the terms of its members, invalidating a host of state votes, including Maine’s, no new term limit initiative has been approved.

A governor could make the case for both halves of the reform plan compelling, despite some inevitable opposition. It’s what we call leadership.

Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 29 years. He can be reached at drooks@tds.net.


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