By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

With steps large and small, Hawai'i has steadily joined the political term-limits movement.

Executives including the governor and Honolulu mayor are limited to two terms, and Honolulu voters recently approved similar limits for the Honolulu City Council.

The theory here is that incumbency tends to reward itself. Without term limits, people become office-holders for life.

There has always been a flaw in this "reform" idea, in that every elected official is, by definition, term-limited. Every two or four years (or six in the case of U.S. senators), we have the opportunity to boot them out if we so choose.

We don't so choose, for the most part. So we turn to artificial limitations to do our work for us.

There may be some logic to the idea of term limits for executive offices, in the sense that it guarantees a flow of fresh thinking and approaches. It cuts off dynastic opportunities.

But it is harder to argue for similar restrictions on the legislative branch.

Honolulu's City Council is a good example. Due to term limits, most of the previous council had to step down. The current council is hard-working and determined, but it did lack experience, particularly in the early days.

A recent edition of State Legislatures, the somewhat wonky publication of the National Conference of State Legislatures, recently published a study on the virtues and drawbacks of term limits.

In general, the term-limit movement is running out of steam, reported staff writer Kavan Peterson. Lawmakers who inflicted limits on themselves are reversing direction, and public sentiment for the idea seems to be dying out.

Part of the explanation lies in a raw fact of political life: No matter what system you adopt, power will be exerted by one faction or another. It's impossible to achieve the perfect balance of power one reads about in civics textbooks.

Where legislators are term-limited, experience shows that power shifts to the governor or, perhaps more ominously, to lobbyists and professional staffers.

That makes sense. If lawmakers are limited to a term or two, they never gain the deep understanding that accrues to the permanent denizens of the capitol.

The article also reports on a survey of what it calls "knowledgeable observers" — legislators, lobbyists, staffers and the media — on changes they see under a term-limits system. The observers claimed that legislators in term-limit states were less connected to their home districts, less savvy about issues, less likely to have legislative specialties and less adept at the legislative process.

Offsetting this amateur quality might be the fact that those legislators are less beholden to special interests and less reluctant to take on new ideas.

The bottom line is that term limits, as with any "reform," have limited value in the world of politics. The only tested reform that is 100 percent effective is the vote, and pathetically few people bother to use it.