Term Limit Declarations Sought Initiative Would Make State List Candidates’ Stands On Ballots

Advocates of strict limits on congressional service have filed an initiative to let Idaho voters know which congressional and legislative incumbents and candidates support their effort.

Citizens for Federal Term Limits want the election ballots to designate whether the incumbents have done everything possible to win adoption of the constitutional amendment required to impose congressional terms and whether challengers for those offices have pledged their support to the campaign.

And the restrictions imposed by the constitutional amendment the organization is supporting are dramatically more restrictive than those another national organization convinced voters to adopt by initiative in 1994.

That proposal, overwhelmingly adopted but now invalid as far as its restrictions on federal office, essentially limited service in the House to six years within 11 years and in the Senate to 12 years within 23 years.

After all state laws limiting congressional service were voided by the federal courts last year for exceeding constitutional qualifications, the constitutional amendment pushed by term limit advocates slaps a lifetime service restriction of six years in the House and 12 years in the Senate.

Supporters must collect 41,335 signatures of registered voters by July 5 to put their new proposal on the November ballot. But while that would seem an insurmountable task based on Idaho’s initiative history, their national organization will likely shell out tens of thousands of dollars to pay people to collect the needed signatures as it did in 1994.

Idahoans for Term Limits, which spearheaded the 1994 initiative, was primarily financed by U.S. Term Limits in Washington, D.C., and was the first organization to forgo volunteer signature gatherers in a petition drive. It paid over $53,000, and possibly $77,000 depending on how discrepancies in campaign finance reports are resolved, to get the needed signatures that year when only 33,000 signatures were required.

The new initiative requires the names of congressional and legislative incumbents who have failed to do everything possible to gain enactment of the term limits constitutional amendment to be followed on the ballot by the statement “Disregarded voters’ instruction on term limits.”

For legislative and congressional challengers who do not sign a term limits pledge, their names would be followed on the ballot by the statement “Declined to pledge to support term limits.”

Those negative declarations for incumbents could be imposed simply failing to second a motion to advance the proposed amendment.

The 1994 law, while backed by 60 percent of the people, has come under criticism because of the service restrictions it slaps on city, county and school board members in such a small state as Idaho. And since the primary target of voter support - term limits on Congress - was voided as unconstitutional, there has been discussion of eventually repealing the rest of the law.