A Stitch in Haste

A remarkably oblivious op-ed on the recent despicable vote by the City Council to extend their own term limits, from a former New York City politician:

But those who want to maintain a democratic check on the executive branch should welcome the result. For while Mr. Bloomberg himself may benefit from the change (if New Yorkers choose to re-elect him next year), it is the City Council whose power will increase in the long term.
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With the additional time in office allowed by extending term limits, City Council members will accrue the expertise and power that come with increased seniority. They will have more time to build relationships with one another and their constituents. This will add up to more leverage to check the mayor.

Read that second paragraph again. The way to protect “democracy” is by giving more power to more politicians. Who but a moral defective politician could possibly say something like that?

This myopic view amounts to “not seeing the trees for the forest.” The point isn’t whether term limits are or are not a good idea. Reasonable people, including reasonable libertarians, can disagree on that question.

The point is that these self-serving power-lusters extended term limits for themselves. Their sole criterion was not whether the vote would improve city governance, but only whether it would improve their own political careers. Their sole motivation was to expand, not the Council’s power, but their own.

Any effort to “improve” government should have two interrelated conditions precedent:

1. A law that applies to the populace should also apply to the politicians enacting that law.
2. A law that expands the power of politicians should not take effect until after the next election those politicians face.

Any law that violates either principle is a prima facie case of self-dealing, and any defense of such a law on “better governance” is not only illegitimate ab initio but also facially absurd.

(This is not to say that attempts to impose the two tests will ever necessarily work. See, for example, this classic 1988 Time article on Congressional obliviousness toward Test 1. The best example of Test 2 is, meanwhile, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment — which, of course, was quickly rendered a nullity when a federal court ruled that automatic cost of living adjustments for members of Congress somehow did not constitute “compensation” in violation of the plain text of the Amendment.)

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Meanwhile, two hasty stitches about Michael Bloomberg and the disgraceful term limit extension.

• The supposed attractiveness of the “incorruptible wealthy patrician politician” has forever been obliterated by Bloomberg’s abhorrent extortion of public support by the various charities and civic organizations who suckle at his philanthropic teat. With politicians, no good deed goes unexploited.
• Regarding the dumb puffery that Bloomberg’s experience, both as current mayor and former Wall Streeter, makes him “indispensable” given the city’s current and pending challenges: That rationalization ignores the pesky fact that city revenues have increased 41% after inflation during Bloomberg’s reign, yet the city is still in financial distress due to his drunken-sailor spending. That’s a mighty bizarre definition of “indispensable fiscal expertise.”

Filed under: Law, Libertarianism, New York City & State, Politics