Collegiate Times

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems set to announce in the near future that he will run for a third term.

This might seem unremarkable if you did not happen to be aware that this is actually an illegal proposal because the mayor, as many other elected officials in the city, is actually limited to two four-year terms. Bloomberg plans to seek that the current, voter-approved, term limits be amended to permit current incumbents to seek a third term but not to remove the limits altogether. His plans have provoked a divided response among the voters and the media over whether his successful mayoralty should be permitted to continue or if he should step down.

The question of what voters can legitimately vote for is of central importance in constitutional republics.

Clearly a wide variety of policies can be legitimately supported but the question arises around some critical matters as to whether anything that the voters want can be permitted to be passed.

The U.S. Constitution clearly imposes limits on what can be implemented with democratic support and, for the most part, we take these constraints, and constraints like them, to be sensible checks on the occasional urges we might have to vote in a fashion inconsistent with our values. Isn't this exactly what term limits do?

Term limits might strike us as different, however, because they are constraints not on what democracy can achieve but rather on democracy itself. Interpretive issues aside, the Bill of Rights limits what the elected congress can seek to pass whereas term limits seek to limit the nature of that elected congress.

Yes, the lengths of terms are fixed, but this does not limit our ability to elect a politician we desire to; it merely forces us to elect them at predetermined intervals.

Democratic decisions on the nature of democracy might seem paradoxical.

The logic of term limits is that of a defense against the well-known benefits that incumbents receive from incumbency.

It seems to be an empirical matter that a politician's first election is by far the hardest to win and that subsequent elections are his to lose rather than the challenger's to win.

The assumption here is that we, despite our best intellectual efforts, fail to truly weigh the merits of candidates in elections because we are mystified by incumbency and so we need to protect ourselves from this particular weakness by imposing a general constraint on ourselves and on the democratic process.

The dilemma that is created by this is that a situation will arise where the voters seek to elect a particular popular politician but continue to recognize the general danger of allowing politicians to be re-elected ad infinitum.

Bloomberg is popular, but so are term limits. His proposal is a compromise of sorts between the particular and the general in that his particular popularity will be respected in his being allowed to run but that the popularity of term limits will be restored thereafter. But is this a compromise or a contradiction?

Surely allowing an incumbent to decide when to make an exception of himself is a troubling approach.

The answer to that question depends on whether we think voters are acting more authentically when they vote in a particular campaign for particular individuals or when they bind themselves to a principle for future campaigns by voting for a general principle of term limits.

Both have their dangers: the delusion of incumbent competency versus the delusion of predicting our future desires. Making an exception for Bloomberg looks as though it violates the general rule, but maybe that's exactly what we want: term limits with caveats.

But what caveats, you might ask?

The founders may have already given us the toolkit to answer this question: Let Bloomberg run and if he wins but not by a sufficient supermajority, say, with two-thirds of the vote, then the term limits kick in.

This allows us to preserve popular will and principle by giving the people what they want in two superficially conflicting ways. This is real compromise.

The editorial board is composed of David Grant, David McIlroy, Laurel Colella, Sally Bull and Jackie Peters.