This is just silly, so silly in fact that I find myself agreeing with Maureen Feeney, whom I despise:
At the hearing and meeting, she went on about being raised to vote, vote, vote. When several voters testified at the hearing that they had little interest in municipal elections, she did not take that as a condemnation of pre-determined outcomes. Rather, that was mortal flaw in the testifier. She represented the anti-limits contingent in declaring that voters had their say (and duty) every two and four years to decide who deserves to be in office. She also represented the related view that it is anti-democracy to limit the voters’ choices by precluding perpetual office holders.
The problem with the term limits crowd is their inability to foresee consequences – or know their history, because those consequences exist as precedents. Simply put, term limits are a form of mass moral cowardice on the part people who want to game the system without putting in the sweat equity.
It almost always backfires.
This crap about citizen-legislators, divorced from politics, taking back government from entrenched incimbents started on the Right in the Seventies, and the results (as in California) increased corporate power and decreased governmental accountability.
It’s not all that difficult to beat an incumbent in a municipal election – if that incumbent has little support, and the challenger has a political work ethic…
