No on Issue No. 3 (Editorial)

We’d like to support the amendment to the Arkansas Constitution mandating ethics reforms; we really would. In 2012, this publication editorialized in favor of a proposed initiated act seeking to reform campaign financing and limit lobbyists’ influence on Arkansas legislators. We’d back a similar proposal again.

But ballot Issue No. 3 isn’t just about ethics reforms. Instead, it’s a freakish hybrid, a gambit to trick voters into expanding term limits for state legislators in exchange for tighter legislative ethics rules. It would partially nullify Amendment 73 to the state Constitution, which passed in 1992 with 60 percent of the vote and which limited lawmakers to three two-year terms in the Arkansas House and two four-year terms in the Senate, for a total of 14 years.

Three Arkansans filed suit in August seeking removal of the proposed amendment from the November ballot. They argued that the amendment “constituted fraud” because of its misleading wording.

“Fraud” is strong language. This is the proposal’s popular name: “An amendment regulating contributions to candidates for state or local office, barring gifts from lobbyists to certain state officials, and setting term limits for members of the General Assembly.”

“Setting term limits” conveys something close to the opposite of what the amendment would do and that’s lengthen the total time lawmakers would be allowed to serve from 14 to 16 years. It may not be fraud, but it’s certainly misleading.

In addition, Issue No. 3 would create an independent citizens panel to decide salaries for lawmakers and other elected officials, freeing the Legislature from ever having to vote itself a pay raise.

Arguments can be made for each of these proposals, including longer term limits, and each of these proposals is worthy of public consideration. But we can’t endorse the current form, as much as we’d like to.