San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Gutierrez’s bill calls Cruz’s term-limits bluff
Roland Gutierrez decided to call Ted Cruz’s bluff.
Every two years since 2017, Cruz has introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate calling for a constitutional amendment that would impose congressional term limits. (Trivia item:
Cruz’s 2017 bill was carried in the U.S. House by a then-obscure Florida congressman named Ron DeSantis.)
Last Monday, Cruz introduced his latest term-limits bill. Like all of his other efforts, this one mandates that U.S. senators serve no more than two six-year terms and House members serve no more than three two-year terms.
“Term limits are critical to fixing what’s wrong with Washington, D.C.,” Cruz said in a Jan. 23 statement. He added that this country’s Founding Fathers “envisioned a government of citizen legislators who would serve for a few years and return home.”
Cruz’s proposed amendment wouldn’t apply to any congressional terms served prior to the amendment’s ratification.
Gutierrez, a Democratic state senator based on the South Side of San Antonio, concluded that if Cruz truly objects to the idea of anyone serving more than two terms in the U.S. Senate, maybe Cruz can model the behavior he seeks — by refusing to run for a third term next year.
“If he wants term limits so bad, just leave,” Gutierrez said. “I mean, it’s that simple.”
He’s correct. The easiest way for an elected official to do something about term limits is to term-limit themselves. That’s what former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke did when he promised voters that he would serve no more than four terms in the U.S. House and then kept his word by giving up his safe seat to challenge Cruz for the U.S. Senate in 2018.
This past week, Gutierrez decided to give Cruz a bit of a nudge, by filing a bill of his own, Senate Bill 596, that would allow Texas to prevent its U.S. senators from serving more than two terms.
In a Jan. 25 letter that was positively drenched in sarcasm, Gutierrez told Cruz, “Your leadership on this issue has inspired me to file S.B. 596 in the Texas Legislature.”
Of course, it’s possible to be sarcastic and sincere at the same time. While Cruz is the last person Gutierrez would ever look to for inspiration, the San Antonio lawmaker does have a genuine belief in the value of term limits.
“I’ve often felt that the ultimate term limit is the voter at the ballot box,” Gutierrez said. “But we’re seeing something that’s very different in Congress — and even at the state level: This entrenched politician that stays there forever, doesn’t get a whole lot done, speaks to their base and their base only, and never sees the bigger picture here.”
There are many examples, past and present, of congressional officeholders who have stayed too long and refused to make room for the next generation of leadership. But all we have to do is consider the case of Chuck Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa.
Two months ago, Grassley was elected to his eighth term in the U.S. Senate. If he completes that term, he will leave office at the age of 95, having served 48 years in the Senate.
I’m all for institutional knowledge, but that’s taking it a bit too far, don’t you think?.
The tongue-in-cheek nature of Gutierrez’s term-limits rollout served as a brief respite for the state senator after eight months of championing the cause of the victims of the Uvalde massacre at Robb Elementary.
The day before he filed his term-limits bill, Gutierrez introduced four pieces of legislation in response to the Uvalde shooting, including one that would create a permanent compensation fund for the victims of school gun violence.
The term-limits issue never goes away, but it reached its peak during the early 1990s. From 1990 to 1994, 21 states approved congressional term limits.
Those restrictions were thrown out, however, by a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court case (U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton) involving an Arkansas termlimits law. The court concluded that mandatory congressional term limits can be imposed only by amending the U.S. Constitution, as Cruz has repeatedly tried — and failed — to do.
The issue has resurfaced, however, in the form of a pending U.S. Supreme Court case (Moore v. Harper) dealing with a 2021 gerrymandering effort by North Carolina’s Legislature.
This case will address the question of whether a state judicial branch has the power to throw out congressional election regulations passed by a state legislature. If the court sides with the North Carolina Legislature, it could create a legal opening for future state efforts to impose congressional term limits.
In the meantime, Ted Cruz is more than welcome to termlimit himself.