Rethinking term limits

New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is “heeding the call to seek a third term,” said the New York Daily News in an editorial, and we say: “Go for it, Mike.” City voters approved a two-term limit in 1993 and 1996, but that was to “rid the City Council of slugs who hung around for decades.” They’re gone, and a city getting walloped by Wall Street’s crisis needs Bloomberg’s “extraordinary management skills” more than “arbitrary” term limits.

Even Bloomberg is against his own “blatant power grab,” said Dan Janison in Newsday. Or at least he was in 2005, when he said changing term-limit laws would be “an absolute disgrace.” The billionaire mayor who “crows he’s different from those typical politicians” is now "changing the limit to three terms—without a public vote." He's different, alright—most politicians can’t afford to buy changes to the city charter.

The term limit should be scrapped, said The New York Times in an editorial, but not just for Bloomberg. Term limits, while “well intentioned,” are “profoundly undemocratic.” They should all be abolished.

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