Mr. Squish and term limits.

In 1990 I was in favor of term limits. Not anymore. Twenty-four years of a short-sighted do-nothing California government, where the politicians only concentrate on their next job, has disabused me of that notion.

One can argue the Founders were in favor of term limits. After all, congressmen only get two-year terms. And yes, in the case of the House of Representatives, the idea was they would serve for brief lengths of time. But not so the Senate. Six-year terms, longer than that of the president; elected (at the time) by the state legislatures; vacancies immediately filled by the governors; staggered terms; the whole system was set up to encourage incumbency, longevity, and stability. Like Parliament, where the House of Commons could be turned over on a regular basis, but the House of Lords would always have the same lords in it, the idea was one house would be forever renewed, and the other not. Term limits for all? Goes against the intents of the Founders.

But in 1990, term limits were a big, big deal. Mostly because of the Republican Party. California has been a blue state for much of the late 20th century, and all the 21st so far. Democratic supermajorities are regularly found in the Legislature—and whenever we elect Republican governors, they’re liberal. (And not fiscally liberal, like I prefer; it was my biggest beef at the time with then-governor Pete Wilson.) Proposition 140 was their baby: They expected term limits to empty the Legislature of all its entrenched incumbent Democrats, and finally give their party a shot. In fact, my Prop 140 bumper sticker had a photo of a crossed-out Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). He’d been Speaker for the past decade, and knew just how to work the Assembly rules to stymie the Republicans. They figured term limits was the only way to unseat him.

Hasn’t worked out that way whatsoever.

I don’t think I’d discussed the new version of Randall MacFloon we see in this strip. The Solano College version (as seen in the original first strip) was Leonard’s panicky, nervous foil. The new version was a blond frat boy. Still a bit nervous though.

I put him in the made-up fraternity of Episilon Chi Theta. The name comes from chapter 4 of Madeline L'Engle’s A Wind in the Door, when Mr. Murry was writing down the ancient Greek word for enemies, ἐχθρόι/ehthrí, on his tablecloth, but only got as far as εχθ. I hadn’t learned Greek yet, but I knew if my made-up fraternity name was too obvious a joke (say, a simple transliteration of an English word, like ΑΣΣ or ΠΙΓ or ΒΥΓ) I’d catch hell from the fraternities. They’d figure I was mocking fraternities in general. Which I was. I mean, some of them are fine organizations. But too many of them are full of jerks, and I already told you about my own trouble with angry frat boys. My goal here was to create an exaggeratedly bad frat, and make fun of it. So I went with ΕΧΘ, figuring the general population was neither literary nor astute enough to figure it out. (Although if you do check a Greek dictionary, you’ll find every word which begins with εχθ- isn’t a pleasant one.)

Later strips tell how Randall joined the Episilons: His entire family had been members of a similarly-named frat, and Randall was expected to join it as a legacy candidate. But at some point in the 1970s, a bunch of them watched Animal House, got inspired, and indulged in the sort of hijinks which (unlike the movie) sent them all to prison and got the frat shut down. Randall’s dad figured the Epsilons had a similar-enough name to be a viable substitute, and that’s the frat his son joined. Randall’s chronic nervousness was the product of a traumatic initiation.

I never did show the whole of the booth Leonard was in: It was the same booth Lucy used in Peanuts, offering psychiatric help for 5¢. The idea was Leonard would dispense voting advice for 5¢, and be just as unqualified as Lucy. But thanks to really poor planning on my part, I only started drawing the election strips in November, and there were only two strips before Election Day. This one ran on Election Day.

Randall and Leonard’s arguments were the only ones I was familiar with. Both, you might notice, are Republican arguments. Like Fox News, I only hung out with like-minded people and didn’t realize I was living in an echo chamber. So Leonard was the “We need to throw the bums out” argument, and Randall was the “What if there’s a really good Republican whom we’d want to keep in office as long as possible?” argument. And I actually thought myself quite fair and balanced for presenting “both sides.”

Same as Fox News, I never bothered to pick any real Democrats’ brains to see what they thought of the whole deal. Their argument—which, in time, came true—was how term limits would shift the power in Sacramento from the Legislature to the lobbyists. The lobbyists would be entrenched in office far longer than the politicians; they’d know where all the bodies were buried and who to connect with whom; they’d be the main source of campaign funds; they’d run roughshod over newbie legislators, all of whom would be gone in six or eight years. The lobbyists would always come out ahead.

I did actually hear this argument during the election, but I dismissed it as cynical hopelessness and corruption. The lobbyists seizing control of the state? You must be mad. Why, the Legislature could easily dismiss them and do the people’s will; the lobbyists had no chance. Shows how naive I was.

Shows how naive the Republicans were when they finally took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. In their Contract with America (then-Minority Leader Newt Gingrich’s ten-point agenda which he used to nationalize all the local congressional races) they claimed they’d never succumb to lobbyist pressure. They’d stay true to their convictions. Some even pledged to limit their own terms: They’d serve three or four terms, then voluntarily step down.

Of course that didn’t happen. Power corrupts. The new Republican congressmen became just as corrupt as the Democrats before them. (More so; they already wrongly believed capitalism is inherently good, so they got into bed with business fast—not recognizing businesses are lobbyists.)

Some politicians figured out how to jump from job to job: One might start in the Assembly, then run for State Senate, then try for Attorney General, then Secretary of State, the Lieutenant Governor, and finally Governor. (Or jump to the federal government, which has no term limits.) Willie Brown went back home and ran for mayor of San Francisco. But all this job-jumping still meant their “longevity” had no stability to it, and their clout went back to zero after every election.

This is always the problem with reform. We try to invent ways to fix the system, and corrupt people always try to find new ways to game it. Fix the holes; they’ll poke new ones.

So whenever someone talks about any new reform, I look to the past to see whether humanity’s tried it before—you know, like the Founders did in The Federalist—or adopt a wait-’n-see attitude. But as for term limits, we’ve tried that, and we’re in a mess. I no longer advocate for it. Doesn’t work. And is unlikely to be overturned, ’cause too many fools still believe, evidence to the contrary, we’re better with them than without them.