City Council's Fradulent Term Limits Scheme - A Progress Report

As noted in prior posts, the City Council is trying to dupe voters into letting them stay in office 12 years rather than eight. The plan is to get voters to approve a ballot initiative on term limits without even realizing that's what they're voting for.

For those of you just joining us, here's a recapitulation of how the scheme has operated so far:

Step 1 of the scheme was to refrain from submitting the proposal to the City's Neighborhood Councils. After all, the last thing you want to do is notify the most politically active people in the City -- even though Section 907 of the City Charter requires the Council to do so.

Step 2 was to use the (highly partisan) League of Women Voters as a cat's paw to "submit" the proposal, so it looked like someone else's idea.

Step 3 was to give the proposal a completely misleading name that omits to mention term limits at all, namely, "City Government Responsibility, Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act." By contrast, the City Attorney, who, having passed the State Bar's ethics examination, apparently still suffers a fondness for truth in advertising, has proposed calling the measure, "LENGTHENING COUNCILMEMBER TERM LIMITS."

Step 4 was to draft the ballot measure so as to bury the provision requiring voters' approval (i.e., the clause changing term limits from eight years to 12 years) in fine print in a morass of other provisions -- provisions that do not require voters' approval.

Step 5 was to ridicule the City Attorney when he issued an opinion letter questioning the propriety of burying the provision requiring voter approval with other provisions that do not. (Click here to read the letter yourself.)

The City Attorney, moreover, pointed out that some of the proposed reforms would weaken, not strengthen, the City's ethics laws.

Rather than seriously considering the legal opinion expressed by the Harvard / Columbia Law graduate elected by the City's voters to ensure compliance with the law, the City Council President -- not a lawyer -- dismissed the former's concerns as "technicalities" and "insider baseball."

It's that kind of cavalier attitude that keeps trial lawyers gainfully employed. If this measure somehow passes, expect the filing of a lawsuit to invalidate it based on the reasoning in the City Attorney's letter.

What will the next step be? Stay tuned. The strategy, apparently, is to keep as low a profile as possible on this issue, so most voters will look only at the ballot measure's inspiring name, and not at the fine print.