The Council vs. voters, again
To the surprise of absolutely no one, members of the City Council — including each of the eight pols competing to lead the body as the next Council speaker — are quietly conniving to alter the term limits law and extend their time in office.
On this, the fourth attempt in a generation to overturn the will of the voters, politicians are betting that New Yorkers will be too distracted or too disinterested to punish them for overturning term limits. They are badly mistaken.
Voters supported term limits by popular referendum in 1993, again in 1996 and a third time in 2010. That last ballot question, which explicitly reduced the limits from three terms to two, carried with an overwhelming 74% of the vote.
But like zombies staggering up the steps of City Hall, members of the Council are reviving the idea once again, wondering whether they should again vote to nullify the results of the referendums.
We’re about to replay the same maddening exercise we went through a decade ago, when then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided he wanted a third term.
Back then, Bloomberg and his advisers concocted an unsavory combination of threats, inducements and raw political cash to win a vote in the Council that changed the mandatory limit on city officeholders from two terms to three.
Christine Quinn, the Council speaker who agreed to engineer the vote, got an additional term for herself and the gratitude of Bloomberg — along with the deep enmity of voters who remembered a speech she’d given in 2007.
“I am today taking a firm and final position,” Quinn had said at the time. “I will not support the repeal or change of term limits through any mechanism, and I will oppose aggressively any attempt by anyone to make any changes in the term limits law.”
That flip-flop came back to haunt Quinn when she ran for mayor in 2013, and lost badly. Many voters remembered the vote she forced through in late 2008. It was an ugly, unforgettable scene. Well before the session began, most of the spectator seats in the Council chamber were occupied by dozens of paid seat-fillers summoned to City Hall for the specific purpose of blocking advocates from the chamber during a heated and emotional debate.
Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who had publicly promised to oppose any tampering with term limits, quietly changed her vote, then left the floor to vomit. Sources said she’d been threatened with a tough legal investigation if she didn’t vote the right way. James Vacca of the Bronx, another “no” vote who flipped to yes at the last minute, was clearly under pressure himself, and stammered a near-incoherent explanation of his last-minute switch.
Bill de Blasio, a member of the Council at the time, eloquently warned his fellow politicians: “The people of the city will long remember what we have done here today, and the people will be unforgiving. We are stealing like a thief in the night their right to shape our democracy.”
De Blasio was proved right the following year, when four of the 29 Council members who’d voted to extend their terms — Helen Sears, Alan Gerson, Kendall Stewart and Maria Baez — were kicked out of office in party primaries. It was the largest housecleaning of incumbents in more than 27 years.
In 2018, Mayor de Blasio has a choice: He can vow to veto any new effort to overturn term limits, or he can do a political somersault.
Other mayoral hopefuls like city Controller Scott Stringer, who supported the 2008 power grab, will need to calculate whether they will again support the idea of ignoring the will of voters.
“This is a defining moment, a gamechanging moment,” then-Councilwoman Letitia James said during the 2008 debate. She argued against changing the law, and voted the same way.
If she wants to be ideally positioned to run for mayor in 2021 herself, she’ll stick to those guns — even if the current Council bill, which only extends term limits on Council members, at some point morphs to offer citywide elected officials the same reprieve.
Most of all, New York voters have to decide if we are prepared to let the Council, whose members supposedly work for us, once again spit in the face of voters. I strongly recommend a call or email to your Council member today with a simple message about tampering with term limits: Don’t you dare.