Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Learning from history

Thursday, April 8, 1999 | 10:50 a.m.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN! I'm talking about the Nevada Legislature and a man who should know better than to waste time and money with Senate Joint Resolution 17. Sen. Mike Schneider, D-Las Vegas, has been a responsible and active legislator for several years. Now he goes completely off track and comes up with this resolution which would give members of the Assembly four-year terms and state senators six-year terms. Even with the present two- and four-year terms, some Southern Nevadans believe too many of their legislators go to Carson City and after a couple of months forget their responsibility to constituents.

SJR17 is twice as bad as Assembly Joint Resolution 16 brought forth in the 1979 Legislature. AJR16 only wanted members of the Assembly to have four-year terms. Of course if it had been successful, the Senate would have clamored for six-year terms. Although AJR16 didn't make any progress, six years later during the 1985 Legislature, up popped SJR15, which provided not only four years for Assembly members but six years for senators. Today's SJR17 reads like Schneider copied some parts of it from the 1985 model.

Schneider believes that the longer terms will put less pressure on candidates to spend so much time raising campaign funds. This is one of the arguments used by Sen. Robbie Robinson of Las Vegas 14 years ago. This could be true in many cases, but it would also allow those few selfish legislators to even further distance themselves from their constituents. I can't name any legislators who vote according to the amount of money given their campaigns, but if there are any, with longer terms they would then be encouraged only to raise the ante.

As I have pointed out in past columns, the framers of the U.S. Constitution limited U.S. representatives to two years so they would be more responsive to the needs of their constituencies.

The framers of the Nevada Constitution also made allowances for two-year terms for assemblymen so they would be more responsible to their constituents. This is as it should be.

Remember, the Founding Fathers came to these conclusions before the convenience of airplane and automobile travel. The two-year terms for lower House members was not agreed upon without great debate. The results have been most satisfying for more than 200 years.

Some scholars have given great thought to amending the U.S. Constitution to provide U.S. senators with four-year terms to replace their present six-year terms. In his book, "Congress: The Sapless Branch," former U.S. Sen. Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania supported four-year terms for senators:

"Six years is a needlessly long term, during which one can become lazy, arrogant and remote from one's constituency. A senator ... is apt to consider himself and the 'club,' of which he is a part, remote and above the political passions of the day, a statesman who can rise above the common herd ..."

Clark continues to write, "If our terms were cut to four years and we were forced to run in the same election as that in which the president was elected, we might make a useful contribution in our respective states to a quadrennial national debate on national issues and, if we backed the winning candidate, return to the Capitol prepared not to sabotage his program but to help him enact it into law."

Sen. Clark, in his book, makes good sense from a vantage point we respect. Many of the problems he points out on the national legislative scene also exist in the state legislative branch.

Allow me to suggest that Schneider consider his SJR17 as just one more wasteful attempt to take out of the Nevada Constitution a restriction that his constituents want and support. He's lucky they don't start an initiative petition calling for one- and two-year terms instead of his desired four and six years.

During the past 20 years, we have had AJR16, SJR15 and now SJR17 tampering with the length of terms of legislators. Come 2010 or before, I'm sure an AJR14 or an SJR18 will show up on the screen and again call for longer terms for legislators. History is oftentimes repeated when people don't learn from past errors. Let's hope there are still enough senators and assemblymen 10 years from now with the wisdom to again keep the next attempt from cluttering up our ballots.