One of the biggest mistakes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has made in recent years was letting veteran reporter Terry Ganey leave for the Columbia Tribune. Apparently experience in journalism is not prized any more than it is in state government where even effective legislators have to leave after eight years in the House or Senate.
In today's Tribune, Ganey examines term limits, with both sides presented fairly. Those who remember my columns from the Carthage Press days may recall that I have always been an opponent of term limits. If they had been the law a few decades back, the state would not have had the benefit of powerful legislators such as Richard Webster and Robert Ellis Young.
While not every legislator has the abilities possessed by those two gentlemen, at least the way it was back then, the voters had the ultimate power to determine who represents them and who has the power in government. Though some abused the power they had, at least we had some say.
Unfortunately, as I argued back in the early '90s, term limits have shifted the balance of power to bureaucrats, and even worse, to lobbyists.
The focus of Ganey's article is a bill by Rep. Gayle Kingery, R-Poplar Bluff to allow a legislator to serve 16 years total in the legislature, even if all 16 comes in one chamber.
While Kingery's idea has some merit, a better idea would be to toss out term limits altogether.
C'mon Randy. Don't fool yourself. Webster and Young were as beholden to money and special interests as Nodler and Hunter. You just didn't hear about it and they weren't required to disclose it.
ReplyDeleteI won't argue with you, but they also accomplished quite a bit during their many years in the legislature.
ReplyDeleteSen. Richard Webster was fiercely protective of his own interests and those of his home district pals, to the detriment of the rest of the state. For instance, he kept Missouri 13 a dangerous two-lane highway between Springfield and Harrisonville in a greedy attempt to force Kansas City-bound traffic to drive through Carthage and up U.S. 71. Only now, years after the Webster era ended (and his son, William, the state attorney general and wouldbe governor, went to prison), is the four-laning of Missouri 13 finally being completed. The prolonged "Bloody 13" era is a sad legacy of Dick Webster's lengthy reign in the state senate.
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