LETTERS: TERM-LIMIT COMEDY SHOW

To the editor:

Those cable customers who recently lost access to the Comedy Central cable service and miss it should have tuned into C-SPAN on Feb. 12. C-SPAN commits itself to gavel-to-gavel coverage of the floor proceedings of the U.S. House. What happened then and there was hilarious.

The object was a resolution which would have, if passed, sent a proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The amendment, when enacted, would have prescribed limits on the number of terms which a U.S. representative or senator could serve. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, right?

A nationwide organizations, U.S. Term Limits, has an agenda whose centerpiece is a state-by-state campaign to get the voters of the various states to pass an amendment to their respective constitutions based on the organization's model amendment. Much of the proceedings for that day concerned that agenda. For a given state, this model requires that state's congressional delegation to do everything in its power to force Congress to foster a rigidly worded federal amendment to accomplish the goal of congressional term limits. The organization's program met with considerable success in the elections just past in that some states, Missouri included, voted to add the state amendment to their constitutions.

The cockroach in the chowder was that those states, while supporting the same wording for the desired federal amendment, actually were backing three different versions. How can this be? It all has to do with the typographical styles used to enumerate the sections of the federal amendment. Since the state amendments required that the U.S. representatives support their one particular version and no other, on penalty of being stigmatized on the next ballot, the laughable result was the same federal amendment was debated, voted on and defeated three times. I thought I was watching a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

The sad thing is two of the three versions are going to have to be changed in order to conform to the third versions. This means that the taxpayers of those states, Missouri included, with the nonconforming versions are going to have to rerun the plebiscites to repeal the old amendment and add the new one or some such complicated procedure.

In all, there were 11 different versions of the federal term limits amendment, including the three of the U.S. Term Limits model. Most differed only in their judgment of the amount of time a legislator can serve without becoming corrupt and desensitized to the attitudes of those whom they represent.

One, a substitute offered by Dingell of Michigan and Barton of Texas, really served a useful purpose in that it revealed the hypocrisy of the term limits crowd. This substitute, in stark contrast to the others, required that all time served up to the ratification of the amendment would have to be counted. The anti-careerism careerists, realizing that their careers might be over a little earlier than expected, predictably treated the Dingell-Barton substitute like buzzard vomit in the punch bowl.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.