Hollis Wormsby
We have midterm elections coming up in November, with primaries in the Jefferson County area scheduled to take place on June 5. I noticed something spending the weekend in Mobile, after riding around my neighborhood looking at the newly placed campaign signs, and that is that as a community, as a state and as a nation, we are in desperate need of term limits at every level of political office.
I started my professional career as an aide to the late Jeremiah Denton, when he served as U.S. Senator for Alabama. Through that employment I got to see the inner workings of the U.S. Senate, as well as through a friendship with the late Jackie Ellis of Senator Heflin’s staff. One thing I learned in my years of employment with the United States Senate, is that for those elected to the Senate, no matter the nobility of their intent upon arrival, that the perks of the Senate – which has been called the greatest country club in the world – make it so the ultimate goal gradually becomes just to get to stay forever. And I firmly believe that this desire to stay in fantasy land is compounded the longer one is allowed to stay.
We have all followed the recent court filings involving Oliver Robinson, a former member of the Alabama Legislature. I don’t think that Oliver is a bad person, I think living in the Montgomery swamp for so long, makes what happens there seem normal and acceptable, because you see it for so long.
As I was riding through my own Bush Hills neighborhood last week I saw the yard signs for the candidates for County Commission Place Two. You have one candidate who has been a Birmingham City Council President, another candidate who has served as a County Commissioner for a combined three terms, a former County Commissioner, and one newcomer that I am not familiar with. In the race for Commission District One, three of the four candidates are current office holders in Jefferson County and the fourth is a former member of the Alabama Legislature.
I was visiting my mom in Mobile this weekend and I saw the same phenomenon, race after race where either an incumbent who has been entrenched for years or a candidate who has held other elective offices and is running for a new office now. Never mind that many are also, in many cases, well over 70 years old.
I see three problems I want to discuss regarding the need for term limits. The first problem is the problem with the probability of being vulnerable to corruption the longer you stay in office. You rarely see a first or even second term elected official caught up in corruption probes. It takes time to develop the personal relationships that make people feel comfortable approaching you about corruption. Also, I think that the longer one operates in an environment where corrupt activities are taking place, the more normal the perception of those activities become.
The second problem is that the lack of term limits is a disincentive for incumbent office holders to choose to mentor the next generation of public servants, as they do not want to risk building up someone that could deny them the lifetime seat at the table our current system allows.
And finally, the lack of term limits, limits the existence of new ideas in our elected officers, as once one group gets elected they hold on for 30 or more years and theirs are the only ideas ever up for consideration.
I have nothing personally against any of the candidates running for election or re-election. I know many of them personally and have great admiration for some. But that doesn’t change the need to limit the terms of service to, in my opinion, two terms for most elected positions and eight years for members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Or at least that’s the way I see it.
Hollis Wormsby has served as a featured columnist for the Birmingham Times for more than 28 years. He is the former host of Talkback on 98.7 KISS FM and of Real Talk on WAGG AM. If you would like to comment on this column you can go to Facebook.com/holliswormsby or email him at hjwormsby@aol.com.
