Term limits prevent long-term corruption

Bob Baker, Las Vegas

Saturday, April 12, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s Thursday story “Quietly, Reid works to void term limits: Effort to strike amendment comes as top legislators stand to lose seats”:

Sen. Harry Reid is concerned that special-interest lobbyists will gain more influence if veteran legislators give way to newcomers.

Well, Senator, that is exactly why 70 percent of your constituents voted term limits into law back in the 1990s. We all know that the longer someone is in office, the more he comes under the influence of the lobbyists with whom he is on a first-name basis.

This law was constitutional or it wouldn’t have become a law in the first place, so quit trying to split hairs and confine yourself to what the people want you to be concerned with — such as the war, the economy, the infrastructure and the overall feeling of everything fragmenting around us.

Fresh people with new ideas, visions and solutions to our problems now and in the future are what we want, and we are not going to get that from the old guard, especially not from any state legislator who seems to fear doing the right thing at the right time and in the right way by leaving office when his time is up.