COLUMBUS – A ballot effort to cap at 12 years the combination of time a person could serve in the Ohio Legislature has cleared an initial hurdle.
Attorney General Mike DeWine on Tuesday certified a petition for a proposed constitutional amendment dealing with legislative term limits.
Ohio is one of 15 states with term limits after voters decided in 1992 to limit state representatives to four, two-year terms and senators to two, four-year terms. That doesn’t bar them from moving between the House and Senate once they have reached those limits or running again after a few years.
The new proposal would limit members to no more than years in one chamber and no more than 12 in the legislature for their entire careers.
The group called Eight is Enough, which turned in the petition signatures, claims term limits keep special interest groups out of politics.
Opponents of term limits, like Carrie Davis of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, says those shorter terms actually increase outside influence, and lead to ineffective governing and partisan deadlock.
“If a community likes their representative and they think this person is knowledgeable and does a good job, once they hit that term limit those voters no longer have the chance to re-elect that person. So it can really deprive voters of that choice,” she said.
The Eight is Enough amendment, written by Maurice Thompson of the libertarian 1851 Center, aslso ends a provision in the law that does not count appointed terms against term limits.
The certification comes ahead of a meeting of the Constitutional Modernization Commission.
The state’s Ballot Board will next decide whether the proposal includes one or more issues.