Since term limits for the Montgomery County Executive will be on the ballot in November (yay, real democracy!), let us now look at the many reasons to further term limit the County Exec (eight years is plenty of time), and send Marc Elrich home to his Takoma Park abode.
Marc Elrich is a career politician and ideological throwback who wants higher and higher taxes and higher costs of living on MoCo families to build his “socialist” utopia. He frequently loses policy debates and state law proposals and then lashes out with personal attacks. He once invited representatives of the Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez to Montgomery County so that he could “promote future socio-economic partnerships for the development of a common goal to address community needs.”
Beyond the current occupant of the executive office in Rockville though, there are many many reasons why further term limits on politicians is a very good thing for your wallet and your freedoms. In fact, one could say there are 10,000 reasons to term limit the County Exec some more:
- “Shortened political horizons created by term limits actually reduce the power of bureaucrats by increasing the quality of control over them according to research conducted in 2019.” – source: Constraining Bureaucrats Today Knowing You’ll Be Gone Tomorrow: The Effect of Legislative Term Limits on Statutory Discretion
- Term limits encourage new thinking in places of power and people with actual real-world lived experience (not decades of political grifting) to run for higher office.
- “The only major opponents of term limits are incumbent politicians and the special interests — particularly labor unions — that support them.” This is 100% factual in Montgomery County, where the only real opposition to the 2016 term limits question was the County Council and a few minions… “Legislators insisted in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote that term limits would strip the Council of important institutional knowledge — and that they weren’t necessary to begin with. “We have term limits, they’re called elections” was a favorite retort to Question B.” [Martin Austermuhle reporting]
- Special interests oppose term limits because they do not want to lose their valuable investments in incumbent legislators / executives (or in this case, County Executives).
- Term limits counterbalance incumbent advantages.
- Term limits will secure the Executive’s independent judgment, free of entrenched government bureaucracy. This is probably more so true with term limits on legislators, which we badly need as well (in the Maryland state house). See point one above.
- “Term limits also would provide inescapable, bracing reminders of what life in the real world is like (for politicians). After former Senator George McGovern tried (and failed) to succeed in small business after spending eighteen years in Congress, he observed: “I wish I had known a little more about the problems of the private sector…. I have to pay taxes, meet a payroll — I wish I had a better sense of what it took to do that when I was in Washington.” (Fund, op. cit., p. 10.)
- Thanks to term limits on the executive, incumbents are less able to use the state / county’s institutions to manipulate elections or erode the power of rival branches of government and political adversaries.
- Hopefully, thanks to term limits, County Execs in the future will feel more pressure to deliver results quickly and leave office with an actual positive legacy. As of right now, Marc Elrich’s legacy is economic stagnation and wide-spread unpopularity. Twelve years is too long for a County Executive to be in power.
- Individuals, no matter how powerful and popular, cannot become indispensable thanks to term limits.
This list can go on and on. Maybe you have counter-arguments, and that is fine too.
More to come.
Related posts:
36-Year Career Politician Marc Elrich Doesn’t “Believe in Term Limits” Anywhere — But 80% of Democrats Do
The Many Times CE Marc Elrich “Gets Personal” When Discussing the Political or Mundane
Marc Elrich Reacts to Ballot Petition Signature Submissions Being Dropped Off; County Charter (Potentially) Being Changed to Restrict County Exec to Two Terms