Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

20 years of term limits: How the faces of Nevada’s Legislature have changed

Legislature Opens

Lance Iversen / AP

Senate Majority Leader Aaron Ford, D-Las Vegas, left, takes the oath of office with his fellow state Senators in Carson City, on opening day of the Legislative Session, Monday, Feb 6, 2017.

Term limits have helped make the Nevada Legislature more diverse in the almost 20 years since they were implemented, though the higher turnover has come with some costs.

Experts say term limits have brought in new faces but reduced institutional knowledge as veteran lawmakers are pushed out. They say lobbyists have more power and the Legislative Counsel Bureau is even more vital both in educating new lawmakers and keeping the legislative process moving.

Voters decided in the 1990s to limit lawmakers to 12 years (six terms) in the Assembly and 12 years (three terms) in the Senate. The cap effected just one lawmaker after the 2017 session, Assemblyman James Ohrenschall, D-Las Vegas, who just finished his last term and announced Wednesday that he’d run for state Senate.

Sen. Joyce Woodhouse, D-Henderson, who will reach her term limit after the 2019 session, says she remembers the steep learning curve when she was a freshman lawmaker. She introduced a resolution this year to create annual sessions, which would give lawmakers more opportunities to prepare, allow breaks during the session and give legislative staff more breathing room in drafting legislation. The bill failed to pass.

U.S. Term Limits Executive Director Nick Tomboulides said 2017 rankings from the Mercatus Center show that states with term-limited lawmakers are performing better in key financial health metrics, on average, than legislatures that do not. He said the Nevada campaign for term limits was locally run with input from his organization.

“The limits would have been tighter if we had run the campaign, since we prefer limits not exceeding the eight years allotted to the president,” Tomboulides said.

Nationwide, Tomboulides says 15 states have imposed term limits on lawmakers. The Mercatus Center ranking puts Nevada’s fiscal condition at above average, with just over half of the top 15 spots taken by states with term limits.

“Of course, this doesn't prove term limits is a silver bullet,” Tomboulides said. “But it does dismantle the myth that people with real-world experience are in over their heads as lawmakers.”

UNLV history professor Michael Green said term limits were implemented in Nevada after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, during a national trend against government and politicians.

“The argument was that it was going to open up government to the people and drive out the professional politicians,” Green said. “Americans tend most of the time not to like professional politicians.”

Green says lobbyists have become key sources of knowledge in a part-time Legislature with term limits, possibly contrary to the intent of voters who passed term limits.

“Legislators need to know a lot about a lot of things,” he said. “A lobbyist needs to know a lot about what he or she is lobbying about.”

Nevada lawmakers can and have served 12 years and then hopped over to the other chamber to prolong their time in the Legislature. He said the limits mean there will always be more newcomers to the Assembly and Senate, which will naturally reduce the amount of long-term experience.

“You can still serve 24 years,” Green said. “That gives you a lot of years for institutional memory, but it’s unusual for someone to serve that long.”

David F. Damore, a UNLV political science professor, says a third of Nevada’s part-time Legislature had not served before this session. He said the state’s biennial Legislature and 120-day sessions empower lobbyists and boost the importance of staff, who become the main sources of institutional knowledge.

“There’s a bit of a generational divide on it,” he said. “Old guard (says), ‘Oh, we don’t need more time.’ New guard, even Republican newbies, will say, ‘Yeah, this is insane.’”

Voters implemented annual sessions in 1958 and reversed course two years later. The Nevada Constitution had an often-ignored session limit of 60 days until voters removed the cap in 1958.

Lawmakers then could meet for as long as it took to get business completed. Damore said floor votes were tallied on a chalkboard, which was replaced with a digital screen when voters capped sessions at 120 days starting in 1999.

“They had to speed things up,” Damore said.

Term limits mean power doesn’t just pass to the longest-serving lawmakers, Damore says, a shift that can bring new ideas to the top levels of the Legislature. He pointed to Sen. Majority Leader Aaron Ford, D-Las Vegas, who still has three sessions in the Senate before he reaches his term limit.

Diversity has been increasing in Nevada’s 40-percent female Legislature, one of the highest female-male ratios in the country. In 2010, Demore said, former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., recruited heavily among Latinos and Latinas to fill a large number of empty seats.

“You didn’t have much of a Latino infrastructure until that moment,” Damore said.

Four lawmakers are term-limited in 2020, after the next legislative session in 2019. In 2022, after the 2021 session, 16 lawmakers are set to reach the cap on their terms.

As she enters her final Senate term, Woodhouse says the limits bring more pitfalls than benefits. She said legislative staff have improved training for freshmen lawmakers over the years, using input from veteran senators and assembly members.

“I honestly believe that the real test of term limits is the voters saying, ‘We’re not going to re-elect you,’” Woodhouse said.

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