OSKAR GARCIA / The Associated Press | Posted: Tuesday, April 3, 2007 7:00 pm
A lawsuit challenging term limits for Nebraska’s lawmakers reaches the state Supreme Court Thursday and could ultimately decide the future of some of the state’s most senior senators.
The lawsuit, filed by constituents of Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha and former Sens. Dennis Byars of Beatrice and Marian Price of Lincoln, says term limits violate voters’ First Amendment free speech and association rights and 14th Amendment equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.
The six voters are asking the high court to review a decision by Lancaster County District Court Judge Karen Flowers, who threw out the lawsuit.
Lincoln attorney Alan Peterson, who helped overturn previous Nebraska term-limits laws, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the voters.
The three senators tried to file for re-election earlier but were rejected by Secretary of State John Gale. Peterson has also asked the court to overturn Gale’s rejection.
In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, Peterson wrote that the term limits were an “indirect (but not very subtle)” undercutting of black voters’ rights in Omaha. Chambers, the 36-year lawmaker and the longest-serving senator in Nebraska history, is the legislature’s lone black senator.
Statewide voters who could not replace Chambers by a general vote “have arrogated the elective power away from his district and made it impossible for him to continue to serve them,” Peterson wrote.
In response, Assistant Attorney General Charles E. Lowe wrote that the claim had no merit and the term limits would affect all voters in the same way.
“Term limits, it is hoped, will encourage more citizens to run for office as a legislator, giving voters more choices,” Lowe wrote. “Term limits express the will of the people to have a ’citizen Legislature’ and not one dominated by ’career politicians.“’
Under the constitutional amendment passed by 56 percent of Nebraska voters in 2000, senators are limited to serving two consecutive four-year terms.
Twenty were barred from running this past November — 40 percent of the Legislature. Sixteen more will not be able to run in 2008. The rest of the 49 will be gone by 2012.
The lawsuit also attacks the language of the constitutional amendment, which says lawmakers shall not be “eligible to serve” after two terms, an argument that Flowers rejected.
The amendment’s third sentence defines a term as “service in office for more than one-half of a term.”
That, Peterson argued, meant that 20 state senators were ineligible to serve during the last legislative session.
Flowers wrote in her ruling that words in the amendment are to be given their “ordinary meaning and interpreted and understood in their most natural and obvious sense unless the subject indicates or the text suggests that they are used in a technical sense.”
“If the meaning is clear, the court will give it the meaning that obviously would be understood by the layman,” Flowers wrote.
Flowers pointed out that the state constitution provides that members of the Legislature shall be elected for terms of four years. She said the amendment uses the “one-half of a term” phrase to compute consecutive terms.
“This is not to say that there will not be a member of the Legislature who is ’term-limited out’ after six years of service,” Flowers wrote. “That could happen to someone appointed to fill a vacancy created by the death, retirement or resignation of a member less than halfway through a term. Indeed, it seems rather obvious that this is, at least part, what the third sentence of the amendment was intended to address.”