Term limit showdown looming?

In 1994 and again in 1996, Nevada voters approved term limits for state elected officials.

The political class tried all the standard arguments: With the loss of all that gray-haired experience, newly arriving legislative rookies would have trouble even finding the bathrooms, let alone standing up to savvy lobbyists and department heads who would pull the wool over their eyes, fooling them into enacting massive tax and spending hikes, etc.

"Yeah, right," voters said. Term limits passed by 70 percent in 1994.

Knowing a second ratification vote in 1996 would carve term limits into constitutional law, the ruling class pulled out all the stops. While their political allies wailed and tore their garments, the state Supreme Court -- basing its actions not on any law or principle but on a mere selfish desire to see judges spared the career-ending axe -- divided the term limits proposal into two questions.

The main term limits question passed again and became law. The "separated" question on term limits for judges alone failed, 59-41.

Nevada's resulting term limit edict is actually among the nation's most permissive, allowing officials to serve 12 years in one legislative house, and then 12 years in the other. Since former lawmakers can and have gone on from there to win election to a county commission or some state constitutional office, the law can hardly be said to have eliminated the "career politician" since taking effect in 1996, can it?

It certainly has not -- in part because it didn't take effect in 1996, at all.

Democratic Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa ruled before the 1996 election that the 12-year count for term limits wouldn't begin until 1998 -- legislators who had already served a decade would get to serve another 12 years before their "term limit" notices were posted on their headboards in the old-age home. The Nevada Supreme Court sided with Ms. Del Papa.

Now, the countdown to 2010 -- when the secretary of state will finally be obliged to tell certain lawmakers filing for re-election to turn up their hearing aids so they can be advised their 12 (or 24) years are up -- grows audible.

So, needless to say, lawmakers who have been at the capital so long they've forgotten what "citizen legislature" means are getting ready to ... retire?

You haven't been paying attention.

State Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, who favors term limits, says his colleagues are casting about for the sacrificial lamb who will file the lawsuit to challenge the term limits constitutional provision yet again.

Their most likely legal rationale? Nevada constitutional amendments have to be enacted twice. But the amendment voters OK'd in 1996 wasn't the same one they approved in 1994, see: The Supreme Court had chopped it in half.

Such a ruling could be sought as a "declaratory opinion" from a lower court, explains Lorne Malkiewich, administrator of the Legislative Counsel Bureau. "They would need to get a court to rule on it and then get it to the Supreme Court. It is something I know a lot of legislators are looking at. They want to know in advance what they can do."

Other than, you know, simply obey the law.

Would the state Supreme Court have the nerve to rule the term limits amendment actually passed only once, because they themselves changed it the second time around?

This is the same high court that ruled in Guinn v. Legislature, mind you, that an overstated constitutional "requirement to fund education" overruled the voter-approved requirement that tax hikes be OK'd by a two-thirds vote in the Legislature.

This is the same high court that threw a state spending restraint initiative off the 2006 ballot based on a technicality -- and "separated" out portions of a popular property rights initiative in an obvous effort to water it down -- thereupon proceeding to throw away the parts they'd "separated."

It could be all in a day's work for Nevada's Supreme Court.