OK, listen up, people, because we’re only going to say this one more time…

The United States Constitution is the guiding principle of our democracy. Nevada’s constitution is the founding law of this state. They are to be respected, upheld, protected. And people who do violence to them — especially those who’ve sworn to uphold the same — should face consequences.

The issue has arisen again this morning, in the Review-Journal’s story about the coming exodus from the Legislature of those affected by term limits. Many people in Nevada favor term limits, and would be mighty upset should a politician sue to try to get them overturned, says state Sen. Bob Beers.

For the record, we’re against term limits. If voters want to keep electing Beers to office, why shouldn’t they have that right? (And why wouldn’t they? He’s a good-looking guy!) Besides, voters in Nevada have shown they have no problem whatsoever identifying and removing elected officials they think are bad. (You know, people like Erin Kenny, Dario Herrera, Mary Kincaid-Chauncey, Lance Malone, Michael Mack, etc.) And they have no problem keeping elected officials who may have tangled with ethics laws but whose offenses, in the public mind, don’t rise to eviction from office (like Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who was found to have violated ethics laws but whose finding was later overturned). Goodman remains popular, and, were he not barred by law from a fourth term, we have no doubt he’d win one.

But that’s not really the point. It seems that a very fine legal argument has been found that could potentially invalidate the entire scheme of term limits for state lawmakers. And that’s this: After the term-limits initiative was approved in 1994, the state Supreme Court pulled what we like to call a state Supreme Court Special, and split the question for the constitutionally required second vote in 1996. In that year, voters were presented with two separate term-limit measures, one for lawmakers and another for judges.

Whoops. That could be a problem, especially given the constitutional language in Article 19, Section 2(4), which says that if an amendment to the constitution is approved by voters at one election, "…the secretary of state shall publish and resubmit the question of approval or disapproval to a vote of the voters at the next succeeding general election in the same manner as such question was originally submitted." (emphasis added)

Now, we don’t think you have to be super-smart to see that a single ballot initiative that proposes term limits for lawmakers and judges, and a pair of ballot initiatives that split the two, is not submitting the question to voters "in the same manner as such question was originally submitted." In fact, it’s totally different.

So it can therefore be argued that the results of the 1996 election — in which lawmakers’ term limits were approved but judges were struck down — was itself unconstitutional, and therefore lawmakers’ term limits must be struck down before they start going into effect in 2010.

(A side note: The question of whether the Supreme Court had any legal basis to split the term limits initiative up is a valid one. We are currently trying to get a copy of that ruling, and we’ll update this post with our opinion as to that ruling when we get it.)

But even if the Supreme Court created the mess in the first place by unconstitutionally messing around with a voter initiative, there still exists a very firm legal basis to strike down term limits. That means that Nevadans — if they still wanted to impose term limits — would have to start all over with an initiative, get it approved at two consecutive general elections and only then would the term limit clock start ticking anew. Why, Bill Raggio could conceivably serve another 100 years! (Don’t laugh; he still looks better than us on most days!)

So will it happen? Probably not. And why not? Well, explains University of Nevada Reno political science professor Erik Herzik, judges are afraid of being voted out of office the way former Justice Nancy Becker was after the infamous Guinn v. Legislature ruling.

"When you want to repeal term limits, you are basically saying the public was wrong and legislators know what’s best," Herzik told the R-J.

Ah, but once again, Herzik wrong. And he’s managed to step on one of our pet peeves in the process.

First, if the Supreme Court did overturn term limits on the grounds we’ve outlined above, they would not be saying anything about the public being right or wrong. The court would be saying that justices in the 1990s were wrong for splitting the question, and thus dooming the initiative on constitutional grounds. Such a ruling would not require any analysis whatsoever as to whether term limits are good, bad or indifferent. In fact, a new term limit initiative could easily be filed the next day, and perhaps that one could get to the ballot without court interference. (The molestation of voter-circulated initiative petitions is an ongoing problem with our Supreme Court, and the subject of some of our previous posts.)

Second, a Supreme Court examination of the issue would not involve legislators, save as plaintiff in a challenge brought against the term limits law. Once again, justices would be repudiating their forbears, not the voters.

And now, for our pet peeve: Becker did not lose her seat because she performed an unpopular constitutional analysis and angered voters. She lost her seat precisely because she failed to perform a constitutional analysis, and that angered voters.

We’ve been over it a million times, but here it is in brief: In Guinn v. Legislature, Becker ruled that it was OK for the Legislature to ignore the voter-approved, constitutional amendment that says you have to get a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature to create or raise taxes. She did it because the Legislature was having trouble getting to two-thirds, and there was a real possibility that schools in the state may not be able to open on time absent extraordinary judicial intervention.

Well, she was wrong. Being a justice of the Supreme Court doesn’t mean you get to ignore parts of the constitution you don’t like; it means you have to work to interpret them to find the most reasonable, most practical and most wise solution to the dilemma before you. But under no circumstances should your ruling do violence to the constitution.

(The court, with some different members, later overturned Guinn v. Legislature, in a quiet little passage in an unrelated case, showing not only that justices recognized the ruling was wrong, but also that they’re not above admitting and fixing past mistakes. That may have to happen again should the term limits law be challenged.)

Get it? In Guinn v. Legislature, the court ignored the constitution for political reasons and earned voter ire. In Future Unnamed Lawmaker v. Miller, the court would be interpreting the constitution and, on its face, ruling that term limits were approved in a manner contrary to the constitution, and thus they cannot be imposed. This, too, will earn voter ire, but it will be a defensible, logical and perfectly harmonious decision that holds our state’s founding document harmless. In other words, the two cases are nothing alike, although the results — the will of the voters being repulsed — would be similar.

Let’s see what happens when the inevitable challenge is filed, shall we?