Losing Good Pols to Term Limits

When California voters in 1990 approved strict term limits on state legislators, they likely didn’t anticipate the downsides--like a primary race between Sheila Kuehl and Wally Knox.

The two well-respected Assembly members will be forced out by term limits next year, after having served three two-year terms. So they’re seeking a seat in the state Senate.

One twist voters may not have anticipated when they sought to oust “career politicians” is that the ousted politicians would play musical chairs and run for other offices.

But here’s the rub in the case of Kuehl and Knox: Both are good enough at what they do to make voters glad they chose politics as a career. And they’re running against each other--which means voters, in choosing one accomplished politician, will lose another.

Knox and Kuehl are vying to represent the southwest San Fernando Valley and Westside in the state Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Tom Hayden, who is also being termed out. In their first debate of the primary campaign, at a Warner Center business breakfast for the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging, Knox and Kuehl couldn’t even think of anything they disagreed on.

All Knox could offer was that, once they went over their voting records carefully, they’d surely come up with something.

Southwest Valley and Westside voters who go over Knox’s and Kuehl’s records would come away impressed. This session Knox led the war against area code overlays and sponsored a bill preventing a person from buying more than one handgun a month. Kuehl sponsored legislation reforming the state’s beleaguered child support system and a bill that clears the way for completion of the 70-mile Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Knox chaired the Assembly’s tax and revenue committees for two years running, and Kuehl used her seniority to negotiate as well as sponsor bills.

Just as the two are at their peak, they’re being booted out by term limits--or graduating, according to Kuehl’s analogy of the Legislature as a high school where “every year, people are running for student body president, and the juniors are always running, and the freshmen don’t know where the buildings are.”

Sure, we wish every political race had two great candidates to choose between. But reality more often dictates that voters choose among a handful of less-than-stellar candidates, or at least among untested freshmen. Citizens who need all the Wally Knoxes and Sheila Kuehls they can get will instead be forced to choose one or the other in the winner-take-all Democratic primary.

Most legislators are publicly wary of taking on term limits, even if they privately acknowledge change is needed, because they’re afraid voters, in their zeal for a citizen Legislature and disdain for career politicians, will view such efforts the wrong way. But Kuehl and Knox don’t have to do much more than run against each other to make the case that more moderate term limits would serve their constituents far better than what California has now.