Excerpt from a Pat Powers post:
When I was in Pierre earlier in the session, I was at a gathering where Breard introduced a spokesman for US Term Limits who cautioned the few legislators there that they’d really hate to see South Dakota get into the term limits battle, but they’ll be here to fight the measure if it passes. To me, the discussion shouldn’t involve an outside group such as US Term Limits. It should just be among the voters who passed it.
Typical of the Judas of the South Dakota conservative movement to push the far-left talking points after gaining information at a conservative gathering. Of course Powers promotes web sites of out of state far-left activists hired by the South Dakota Democrat Party to trash conservatives like Steve Kirby. He also promotes the Minnesota Planned Parenthood web site that pushes an immoral agenda on South Dakota. I issue another warning to conservaitves if Pat Powers is in the room. He cannot be trusted.
Now in regard to the term limit controversy. The premise behind those in support of eliminating term limits is that the legislative branch is at a disadvantage to the executive branch and special interest lobbyists because the citizen legislator lacks institutional knowledge. And further, the voters can place term limits on any legislator they deem to be in the back pocket of special interests and are not representative their constituents by not voting for them.
My response to that is how can you argue on one hand that citizens don’t have enough knowledge to be citizens legislators, but have enough knowledge to vote on their representative, let alone ballot issues such as the removal of term limits?
I argue that the imbalance of power is due to too much power in the hands of the executive branch. Look at HB1266, an act to require standards for the exercise of delegated legislative authority. The proposed legislation said in part:
Any statute that delegates an absolute, unregulated, or undefined discretion to an administrative agency is considered to be an unlawful delegation of legislative authority.
That would have prevented citizen legislators from turning over their power to the executive branch. It passed the House 55 to 14. It was killed in the liberally stacked Senate State Affairs 6 to 2. Here are the legislators that should be voted out of office for voting against HB1266:
Hanson (Gary), Heidepriem, Knudson, McCracken, Olson (Ed), Dempster
How many citizens are paying enough attention to know about that vote? I don’t remember the media saying boo about that most important piece of legislation. So how can the voters have enough "institutional knowledge" to make an informed vote?
And in regard to the issue of lobbyist's power, the Clean and Open ballot issue would go a long way toward bringing the power of the lobbyists back in line with that of citizen legislators.
The solution is not to increase the ability of the executive branch and lobbyists to create cozy relationships with legislators by removing term limits. This will not give more power back to the people. Instead we need to diminish the power of the executive branch and the lobbyists so that the people’s representatives have more of chance to represent the people. If there is not enough informed citizens to step up to the plate when their representative are term limited, then we have a huge problem with uninformed voters that undermines the effectiveness of the democratic process. In fact, way too many voters are being mislead by the biased media. How do we fix that? Not with eliminating term limits.
