Still fighting term limits

     It's been barely four months since Nevada voters put the finishing touches on a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of state and local officeholders -- and already the politicians are pushing to undo it.
      Assembly Speaker Joe Dini this week got the Elections, Procedures and Ethics Committee to request a bill draft that would begin the cumbersome process of repealing the amendment. If lawmakers approve the bill this year and in the 1999 session, it would be presented to voters early next decade.
      And to those who might see this as the wheezing political establishment's last gasp to forestall reform -- perish the thought!
      "It's not (Speaker Dini's) intent to undermine what the public wanted," explained Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, the Las Vegas Democrat who chairs the elections panel.
      Let's see, the public votes in favor a measure twice and then Speaker Dini requests a bill to kill that measure. By george, Ms. G is right. How could anybody possibly reach the conclusion that Speaker Dini wants to undermine the desire of the electorate? Why, it's cynics like that who threaten confidence in our public institutions.
      Instead, Ms. Giunchigliani assures everybody, Speaker Dini simply wants another chance to educate voters about the evils of term limits. State judges, you'll recall, avoided a term limits measure aimed at them last year by arbitrarily breaking off judicial term limits into a separate question, which could then be demagogued at leisure. So, these lawmakers believe, if they revive the issue, maybe they can raise enough money to spin the voters 180 degrees on term limits for state legislators.
      "What the speaker is saying is that judges got politically organized and we did not," said Ms. Giunchigliani. "His argument was that we were asleep at the switch."
      And apparently they remain comfortably in the land of nod. Defenders of the political status quo -- primarily Democrats and their supporters -- have spent millions of dollars in battles across the country to defeat term limits for lawmakers, and failed dismally in virtually every instance.
      The pros and cons of term limits for legislators have been thoroughly debated in this nation's courts, media and gathering places for the better part of a decade. Nevadans knew precisely what they were doing when they twice approved an amendment to the state constitution imposing term limits on officeholders.
      Those pushing the idea that Speaker Dini & Co. deserve another chance to try to run roughshod over Nevada voters and overturn their obvious preference reveal an outright hostility to the democratic process.