Term Limits Campaign Has Friends In High Places

Asking Capitol Hill incumbents to say yes to term limits is rather like inviting turkeys to consider the merits of Thanksgiving.

Regardless, a constitutional amendment campaign now under way has won friends in the Idaho and Washington congressional delegations.

Even though the amendment isn’t likely to pass in this session of Congress, three of the region’s four senators will probably vote yes in April when the Senate considers Joint Resolution 21. That’s an amendment that would impose uniform term limits of 12 years on all members of Congress.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, previously co-sponsored an amendment limiting House members to six years and senators to 12. He was still a sponsor last February when the Senate Judiciary Committee increased the House limit to 12 years, but the proposal never reached the Senate floor.

A spokesman for Sen. Dirk Kempthorne, R-Idaho, said the senator has supported limits of 12 years in each chamber and is likely to support a proposed constitutional amendment with these limits.

Term limit supporters also will be able to count on the vote of Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.

“The senator would support an amendment because the people of the state of Washington have made their views very clear,” said Heidi Kelly, Gorton’s press secretary.

Term limits became a major issue in Washington’s 5th District when an initiative was improved by Washington state voters in 1992.

Last year, the initiative was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said she would not support a constitutional amendment unless the limits apply to current members of Congress. But term limits supporters said retroactive limits would be almost impossible to pass because members of Congress would be unlikely to restrict their own service.

“The only way we’ll get an amendment passed is with prospective term limits,” Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., said last week. “They would start with the election after the amendment takes effect - that’s pragmatic reality.”

McCollum sponsored a measure with 12-year limits that passed the House of Representatives 227-204 last March.

Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., and Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, both voted in favor of limits. But the 227 votes were more than 60 short of a two-thirds majority, making term limits the only one of the House Republicans’ 10 “Contract with America” planks to fail.

Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate and ratification by 38 states.

“We’re for the strictest term limits that can pass, but you have to build a big tent to get a super-majority,” said Cleta Mitchell, director and general counsel for Americans Back in Charge. The term-limits advocacy group that originated in Colorado in 1989 is sponsoring the latest proposal.

While the House is not likely to vote again on term limits in this Congress, Nethercutt last week repeated his 1994 campaign promise to serve no more than six years. But he said his defeat of 30-year incumbent Tom Foley in 1994 might have led some people to question the point of term limits.

“There are fine arguments on both sides of the issue, and the proof of that is sitting in this chair,” Nethercutt said, pointing to himself.

Foley joined a lawsuit against the ballot initiative’s limits in 1993.

The Washington state initiative would have imposed term limits of six years on representatives and 12 years on senators. Idaho joined Washington among the 23 states - 17 of them west of the Mississippi - that passed such caps in the early 1990s.

But the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last May held that neither Congress nor the states can impose requirements for elected federal office apart from those of age, U.S. citizenship and residency that the Constitution lists.

The high court ruling does not overturn Washington state’s term limits for its own state legislatures of six years in the House and eight years in the Senate.

, DataTimes MEMO: Changed in the Spokane edition.