From Business Week

Commentary by Caroline Baum

March 10 (Bloomberg) — The public is mad as hell at Washington: at the corruption, the underhanded deals, the earmarks, the sense of entitlement that comes with lifetime employment. If we don’t want to take it anymore, we can do something about it.

We the People of the United States need to make clear to our representatives in Congress, or their challengers, that our vote in November is contingent on what’s-his-name’s support for term limits. No support, no vote. Got it?

Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, introduced a “Term Limits for All” constitutional amendment in November. The amendment, co-sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Sam Brownback, Republicans of Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, respectively, would limit every House member to three terms and every Senator to two. Only with an end to the “era of permanent politicians” will real change come to Washington, DeMint said.

The last big push for term limits came from the party in power. When the Republican class of ‘94 swept into Washington, taking control of both houses of Congress, enacting term limits was high on their priority list. Twenty-three states had already term-limited their congressional delegations via referenda or their state legislatures, according to Philip Blumel, president of U.S. Term Limits, a grassroots organization leading the charge. A 1995 Supreme Court ruling, U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, held that states do not have the authority to impose limits on congressional service.

Bipartisan Support

A different Supreme Court might see things differently. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Constitution is “simply silent on this question.” The silence isn’t about to be broken with President Barack Obama and the Democrats in charge.

That leaves an amendment to the Constitution, which requires passage by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states.

“Three-quarters of the states is not going to be a problem,” Blumel said. “They have a vested interest in rotation in office” as it provides more open seats.

Term limits is equally popular with the public, among Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. In an October 2008 national poll commissioned by USTL, 83 percent of Americans said they support term limits, the highest ever.

Guess who opposes term limits? Incumbent politicians, their staffs and lobbyists in search of legislative favors.

Evolution of the Species

And why not? There is no better guarantee of lifetime employment than incumbency. In the last 10 congressional elections, the re-election rate in the House was 94.6 percent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, independent research group tracking money in U.S. politics.

Incumbency doesn’t confer the same degree of security on Senators, with “only” 87.5 percent of sitting senators returned to office since 1990.

How is it, then, the average length of service for senators at the start of the 111th Congress was 12.9 years, just over DeMint’s two-term target?

Answer: Because less than half the people appointed to serve out a senator’s seat end up running for office, according to the U.S. Senate Historical Office. For every Paul Kirk, an interim senator for five months following the death of Massachusetts’ Ted Kennedy, there is a Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who has been in the Senate for 51 years.

Founders’ Reservations

Byrd, 92, represents the kind of permanent ruling class the Founding Fathers feared. They would not recognize today’s Leviathan as the same federal government they created and to which they gave enumerated powers.

If the voters are fed up, why not throw the bums out? Blumel said incumbency is such an overwhelming advantage, many elections are uncontested and others don’t offer voters a meaningful choice. “If Ted Kennedy had lived, would Massachusetts have had a significant election?” he asked.

Thirty-seven states place some form of term limits on their elected officials, according to USTL. New York isn’t one of them. In the 3,000 bi-annual elections for New York State Senate and Assembly seats since 1982, 39 incumbents were defeated, according to watchdog New York Public Interest Research Group. A state legislator is more likely to leave office because of ethical misconduct than death, redistricting or defeat at the polls.

Our elected officials may go to Washington to do good, but they end up doing well, as the saying goes. They forget why they were elected — to do the people’s business — and focus on their own: fundraising and campaigning for re-election.

Entitlement Reform

Congressman Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, who was forced to give up his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee last week, isn’t a bad person. He got comfy with the perks of power.

Rangel served his country with distinction in the Korean War before serving his Harlem constituents for 40 years. His ethical lapses include underreporting income and underpaying taxes, accepting corporate-sponsored trips, using official letterhead to solicit money for a City College of New York education center that bears his name, and maintaining four rent- stabilized apartments, a violation of New York City rules.

He’s not alone. Remove the security of lifetime employment and lawmakers might actually have to do something productive.

With public approval of Congress at an all-time low and support for term limits at an all-time high, it’s time to seize the day. What can you do? Sign the petition on the USTL Web site. Contact your senator or representative and tell him your vote is contingent on his support for term limits.

We the people have a voice.

From Frederick News Post

It may be time for the debate to begin once again on term limits for our members of Congress.

What has become painfully apparent is that the check voters provide each election year — i.e., voting the bums in or out — is no longer adequate. The system is broken and stacked against voters, who are demoralized by the extremes of both parties and dropping party affiliation in droves to join the ocean of the disenfranchised.

Approval ratings for Congress, never high to begin with, are at an all-time low.

According to a recent Gallup poll, eight in 10 Americans think that the job our representatives and senators are doing, to be frank, stinks.

Gridlock and indecision, political haymaking and partisanship have rendered our representation impotent. Both parties share the blame, and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Men and women of conviction have been ground under the heel of party groupthink.

The wiles of power have become just too appealing. The seniority system on Capitol Hill is partly to blame, whereby the longer in office, the more power is accrued (seemingly absent of real ability or ethical standards, in many cases). Detachment from real life is almost inevitable.

This entrenchment stifles new ideas. Career politicians become more and more beholden to the monied interests that put them in office. Campaigning — and the party posturing that comes with it — becomes relentless.

Our political ancestors, with their mistrust of political power, would cast shame on today’s system of governance. They eagerly engaged in and supported rotation in office. Unfortunately, in one of their few oversights, they didn’t write that into the Constitution.

Lawmakers were never supposed to see their life in public office as a career, but as the culmination of a successful life, a time to dispense the wisdom and perspective gained from years spent out in the real world.

So we’re suggesting that our representatives in Congress be time-limited. One term of six years for a senator, three terms of two years for a House member. After a reasonable period — say, six years –they should be free to run again.

How much more effective would our lawmakers be, especially late in their political careers, if freed by the looming deadline to vote their conscience, instead of the position they believe will best fill their coffers with campaign funds, or deliver punched chads at the ballot box?

The problem of stagnation and partisanship in Washington could be solved in one fell swoop.

Of course, this is all a pipe dream. The foxes guard the henhouse. What cozily nested politician is going to willingly vote for an end to his or her time in a comfortable leather House or Senate chair?

Probably not a one.

From My South End

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that has taken no action to restrain eminent domain-the government’s ability to seize property rights with due monetary compensation but without the owner’s consent-after the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision finding eminent domain for private use constitutional. It seems self-evident that forcibly taking property from one owner and giving it to another for financial gain is unfair-even un-American; yet, our legislature seems reluctant to take up the Court’s suggestion that states may enact their own restrictions. The reason is a lingering-but mistaken-belief that eminent domain is an indispensable tool for economic development and tax base enhancement.

But the opposite is true. The evidence has been clear since 1964, when Martin Anderson, then with MIT/Harvard’s Joint Center for Urban Studies, published a book titled The Federal Bulldozer, an analysis of the economic impacts of eminent domain as used in urban renewal. He provided clear documentation that in the years since private-benefit eminent domain became government policy in 1949, it had cost the taxpayers hugely more than it produced, and boded to remain a liability for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Boston is today still pock-marked with several hundred acres of land taken, cleared and held tax-exempt by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, land where people and businesses would have supported vibrant community life and paid taxes for these forty or fifty years. Eminent domain drove out residents, broke up communities, and decimated the small-business base.

In 2008, a Wall Street Journal editorial discussed a study by a private organization, Institute for Justice, which found no discernable hindrance to economic activity from the restriction of eminent domain, even in states implementing the strongest reforms after Kelo. The Journal agreed with the report, noting that although developers like to get land the government forces sellers to give up at cheap prices, and politicians like to play power games picking winners and losers, projects that can’t stand on their own shouldn’t be propped up by the taxpayers.

In 2009, William J. Stern, who ran the New York State Urban Development Corporation’s Times Square redevelopment project, wrote a report revealing that eminent domain “delayed development, added tremendous cost, and was unfair and inefficient”-and fraught with corruption.

It’s only logical that eminent domain-like other unfair public subsidies-would have negative effects. First, this kind of government intervention props up bad business plans and encourages overblown, risky projects that would be weeded out by the private markets, often leaving the city to clean up a big mess. Aside from the empty lots scarring the city, Filenes, Columbus Center and North Point are three recent grandiose local plans that were given all sorts of land, regulatory and tax favors, only to collapse of their own overreaching weight. Pfizer, the corporation for which the City of New London seized and destroyed Suzette Kelo’s home and neighborhood, recently decided “nevermind,” and moved out of town altogether, showing again, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “the futility of eminent domain as corporate welfare.” Read Nicole Gelinas’s City Journal story of the Atlantic Yards project in New York, where decay and disinvestment are the result of “a half-decade’s worth of government-created uncertainty, which stopped genuine private investment in its tracks.” We started to see tenants leaving and building maintenance neglected in the Fenway ten years ago, when a large swath of the neighborhood was declared blighted (or “potentially” blighted!) because the Red Sox team owners wanted to relocate the ballpark and fill its current site with profitable towers. Eminent domain costs the taxpayers money up front in takings compensation, and then for unpredictable periods of time in the loss of taxpaying properties. It destroys organically evolved communities and tries to replace them wholesale with artificial aggregates of buildings and people that don’t fit into the context and lack the interstitial tissue to function cohesively. And it end-runs the competitive markets, putting decisions into the hands of politicians with short-term political and financial goals, and engenders corruption, cronyism, and influence-peddling. Eminent domain is bad government and bad business.

As the WSJ reminds us, private development went along very nicely for centuries before politicians decided to take property from one person for the benefit of another. As Stern learned from his Times Square experience, “There was no shortage of developers willing to acquire property the old-fashioned way-through the private market.”

In today’s climate of economic distress, politicians are especially vulnerable to the fear-mongering lobbyists’s argument that we mustn’t lose any tool that could stimulate the economy. But the facts on eminent domain should liberate our elected officials to do the right thing-if that’s what they want to do. They should act now to eliminate private-benefit eminent domain, both by legislation and by constitutional amendment, to get government out of the business of business, let the competitive market determine development, and use scarce public money for real public needs.

The Judiciary Committee just heard several bills that would prohibit eminent domain for other than the traditional public uses-schools, parks, roads, etc. House Bill 1778 in particular serves the purpose well: it contains no “blight” loopholes, and would also prevent eminent domain taking of public land for private use.

Write to your legislators before March 17, the Committee decision date, and tell them to pass H. 1778. More important, tell them to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting private-use eminent domain at the Constitutional Convention scheduled for July 29. Without this amendment, each politically wired developer will simply get a new law passed that allows for a taking s/he wants, “notwithstanding any other laws to the contrary.”

The last word, again from the Wall Street Journal: “If there is a lesson from Connecticut’s misfortune, it is that economic development that relies on the strong arm of government will never be the kind to create sustainable growth.”

Shirley Kressel is a landscape architect and urban designer, and one of the founders of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods. She can be reached at Shirley.Kressel@verizon.net.

From The Tulsa Beacon

A House committee passed legislation that would restrict the inappropriate use of eminent domain while protecting all legitimate uses.

House Bill 3053, by state Rep. Pat Ownbey, would force agencies to declare unused land surplus and offer to resell it to the original owner after 10 years. The legislation also strengthens notification requirements when using eminent domain to seize property.

“My legislation ensures the proper use of eminent domain so that property owners are not taken advantage of,” Ownbey, R-Ardmore, said. “Too often, after property is acquired by eminent domain, it is not used for the purpose originally cited to justify seizing the property. Sometimes, development that was planned falls through. This bill makes it possible for an individual to get their property back if it is not being used.”

Ownbey said a 1959 Oklahoma Department of Transportation use of eminent domain is an example of what his legislation would address.

“In 1959, the Department of Transportation condemned private property along State Highway 199 in Marshall County and in Carter County to widen the highway to four lanes from Madill to Interstate 35 south of Ardmore,” Ownbey said. “The highway eventually became State Highway 70 from the Carter County line to Madill, but it never became four-lane. To add insult to injury, the Department of Transportation began a project to four-lane the highway in a different area, along Oakland in 2009. Basically, my legislation is saying that if you’re going to take people’s land for public use, you’d better use it as advertised and you’d better do it within five years.”

Chickasha in the 1970s condemned private property for a city lake to be built. In addition to condemning the surface, the city also condemned the mineral rights of the property owners arguing that oil and gas production on the property would contaminate the water supply and would be detrimental to the citizens of Chickasha. Nevertheless, after acquiring the property and mineral rights, Chickasha then leased the minerals for exploration and possible production.

Ownbey said despite the new restrictions, the government would not be hindered from the legitimate use of eminent domain.

“I want to make it clear that there is no loss of eminent domain to a government entity,” Ownbey said. “This legislation is a fair balance between property owners and the government. The time period and sales price will serve the owner, while the power of eminent domain will remain in the hands of government. Surely private property owners deserve some protection from a government entity that has the power to take property from them.”

Oklahoma Farm Bureau Vice President of Public Policy Lori Kromer Peterson said her organization was endorsing Ownbey’s legislation because she supports private property rights.

“One of the top priorities for our organization is private property rights.” Peterson said. “In general the farm bureau would oppose the use of eminent domain, especially when it was not used for some public purpose. We support Representative Ownbey’s legislation because we support the landowners right to purchase their property back if it is not used for the purpose it was taken for.”

Brogdon signs Mt. Vernon Statement

State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Randy Brogdon, R- Owasso, has signed the Mount Vernon Statement.

The Mount Vernon Statement, crafted by various conservative leaders across the country including former Attorney General Meese, The Heritage Foundation, and Concerned Women for America, was written to ignite a constitutional reawakening in the country stating, “The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles.”

Brogdon, is running on a platform of limited, constitutional government. Brogdon said, “My long-held position is a popular one with the people. I believe in the Constitution and the rule of law and we need documents like this to remind us of our founding principles.

“By signing this statement, I am once again publicly pledging to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States.”

From The Post and Courier

In the 14 years since South Carolina’s charter school law was passed, the number of charter schools stands at 37. It would have been more had state law and local school districts been more accommodating to their creation.

It is time for the Legislature to make adjustments to the law that ensure financial support for charter schools and relieve them of some burdensome rules. Rep. Phil Owens, R-Easley, has filed a bill, which passed out of committee and is before the full House. It provides a good start.

Most of the bill’s provisions shouldn’t be controversial. For example, it would allow for single-gender charter schools that are now prohibited. It would allow school districts to deduct money from charter schools’ allotments to cover modest supervisory costs. And it would change the election schedule for charter school boards to provide sime continuity.

The sticking points are likely to be those involving money — something no schools have enough of these days. Charter schools need help. Those in the State Public Charter School District, in particular, receive about half the per-pupil allowance that other schools receive, and that is hardly fair.

What seems unnecessarily controversial is a proposal to allow public schools that convert to charter schools to give priority admission to students within their attendance zones.

It recognizes that neighborhood schools require less transportation and foster a sense of community.

Indeed, Charleston County School Superintendent Nancy McGinley has recently won conceptual support from the board for a choice plan to reconfigure the school district so that students in each quadrant of the county would have several schools from which to choose — all of them nearby.

Another provision would be complicated but worth pursuing — allowing charter school students to participate in extracurricular activities, including sports, at their neighborhood schools (if the charter doesn’t offer them).

Charter schools are public schools, and it’s clearly in the best interest of students to foster their artistic, leadership or athletic talents.

The charter school journey has not been smooth. But the efforts of charter advocates have paid off in the form of student successes and in demonstrating that school choice is a worthy aim.

Governing legislation should help maintain momentum for a significant educational trend.