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Back in the day, I used to shake my head while watching state lawmakers work late into the night – sometimes till midnight – to get legislation passed at the end of a session.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to do that kind of work for 12- to 15 hours,” I’d think to myself.
Actually, the pay for state senators is $12,000-a-year, plus some per-diems for expenses and (as they say around Lincoln) “all you can eat and drink.” The salary hasn’t changed since 1988.
It takes some patience and endurance to work that long each day, and it always occurred to me that the best decisions aren’t made late and night when you’re exhausted from endless debate, lobbying and discussions and just want to go home.
(And, as we saw recently in Minnesota, it takes courage to serve in public office.
Threats against public servants are on the rise, and some nut job in Minnesota apparently decided to take matters in his own hands, with a gun, with fatal consequences. It’s sickening.)
But election year after election year, candidates sign up to run for public office, despite the low pay and lack of regard for their service.
Already, we’ve seen one former state legislature who was term limited, Patty Pansing Brooks of Lincoln, sign up to regain her seat in 2026. She isn’t the first former legislator to come back, if she wins election she would follow a long list of former senators who came back, including current Sen. Danielle Conrad.
But now, once again, there’s an effort to allow senators to serve a third consecutive, four-year term in office, expanding the current term limit adopted by voters in 2000 that restricted service to two consecutive terms.
I’m not a fan of term limits. It’s prevented some really smart legislators from continuing to serve and has destroyed the continuity and institutional knowledge needed to solve the really tough issues, such as our high property taxes and overcrowded prisons.
You know, the issues that never seem to ever be solved.
It takes a while to understand the really tough issues, like tax policy, corrections and budgeting. And when state senators don’t have that knowledge base, guess who fills the power vacuum? – special interests, lobbyists and the executive branch.
We always hear the saying “government should run like a business.” (If that means “as efficiently as possible,” I’d agree, but there’s a huge difference between running a government where the goal is “service” and a business where the objective is “profit”.) But I think it’s pretty clear that in business, we wouldn’t fire an effective chief executive after eight years just because eight years had passed. That would be crazy. We would want that business to profit from that CEO’s experience and know-how, and for that leader to stay on.
But term limits, which were pushed mainly by out-of-state interests, are popular with voters. There’s an unhealthy and undeserved “throw the bums out” mentality with many people. So terms limits pass when put on the ballot.
But I gotta think that if the really hard-working and deep-thinking senators – like the Jerry Warners and Dave Landis and Scott Moores of the past – were still allowed to serve more than two terms, some of the really tough issues would have been worked out and solved by now.
So put me down as a “yes” vote for the constitutional amendment coming on the ballot in 2026 to expand legislative term limits from two, four-year terms, to three terms.
Knowledge and wisdom, and being given the time to acquire it, is a good thing.
