Time's up! (term limits for members of the Michigan Legislature) (includes related articles)

Summary

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Michigan voters chose to impose six-year term limits on members of the state Legislature when they enacted that law in 1992. Thus, 64 House will not be eligible for reelection by 1998 while Senate members may run for a four-year term if they already occupied their positions when the law was enacted in 1992. By the year 2002, one's maximum stay in the Legislature will have been eight years. In the meantime, legislators are still bewildered over the implications of the law which limits their ability to impose changes and create new laws.

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Time's up! (term limits for members of the Michigan Legislature) (includes related articles)

Let the experiment begin as the Michigan Legislature says farewell to experience.

In 1975, David Hollister was a 33-year-old first termer in the Michigan House of Representatives when he watched in helpless frustration as his grandfather struggled in vain to end unwanted life support after two strokes.

In 1990, with 15 years of experience, acumen and clout under his belt, Hollister finally persuaded his fellow lawmakers that the state of Michigan needed to authorize the living will. Today, citizens of this state can execute documents that instruct hospitals and physicians to end extraordinary treatment in the event they are struck by serious injury or illness.

But what if Representative Hollister (mayor of the city of Lansing since 1993) had been shown the door after six years? What if the 1992 voter-enacted limits on the terms of House members had been in effect two decades earlier? The short answer is: Nobody knows.

Certainly, the grassroots term limits movement that swept Michigan and the rest of the country in the early 1990s wasn't aimed at maintaining feeding tubes in the terminally ill. Backers of the Michigan proposal almost never cited specific legislation in their cam...

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