The Senate approved a measure that would allow voters to decide whether to amend the constitution to limit statewide elected officials to two terms.
March 19, 2013The Senate floor saw its first real fight of the 83rd session Tuesday over a bill by Kevin Eltife, a Republican from Tyler. The bill, Senate Joint Resolution 13, would ask Texans to consider an amendment to the state constitution that would institute term limits for statewide elected officials—no future governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, land commissioner, agricultural commissioner or railroad commissioner could serve more than two consecutive terms.
The bill passed the Senate, but not before some sharp words were exchanged.
Leading the charge was Craig Estes, a Republican from Wichita Falls, who offered two amendments to Eltife’s bill. The first would extend term limits to the judiciary, the second to the legislature. Estes explained that he objected to Eltife’s bill because it treats the separate branches of state government differently; if anyone was going to have term limits, Estes argued, everyone should.
His colleagues were apparently taken aback by this. In introducing the bill, Eltife had explained that although he believed in term limits for the legislature, he had not included such limits in the bill because he felt doing so would “simply kill the legislation”; legislators, in other words, aren’t likely to term-limit themselves. As for the judges, Eltife had started out by saying that he was “less than certain” about the value of term limits for them.
Estes, as it turned out, was reasoning similarly. That became clear when John Whitmire, a Democrat from Houston, questioned why Estes wanted to impose term limits on the judiciary. “Can’t you draw a distinction in the executive branch versus the judiciary?” asked Whitmire, who went on to point out that the executive branch has powers of appointment that the judiciary lacks.