Karen Handel on Government Reform

Defended and implemented photo ID for voting

Implemented ban on Georgia legislative gifts & nepotism

I couldn't control the ethics rules of the state legislature, but I did control the ethics within the secretary of state's office. My 1st month in office, we implemented a ban on gifts, abolished the time-honored tradition of nepotism, and even established a one-year cooling-off period during which no former staffer could lobby the agency. And these rules applied to me as well.

No "secret orders"; no nepotism; no revolving door

It is also important to Karen for government to "let the light shine in." Georgians turn to the Secretary of State's Office for important consumer information regarding license holders and securities professionals. Unfortunately, a decades-old policy of allowing "secret orders" kept this information in the dark. The public now has access to the information on most of the Office's actions and can find much of this information on the agency's website. Open records requests are approached with the attitude of determining what can be provided instead of focusing on how not to provide information.

Signed term limit pledge: 6 years House; 12 years Senate.

Organizational Self-Description: U.S. Term Limits, the nation's oldest and largest term limits advocacy group, announced that 14 new signers of its congressional term limits amendment pledge have been elected to the 114th Congress. The group includes five new senators, eight new House members and one House incumbent who signed the pledge for the first time this cycle. The pledge calls for members to co-sponsor and vote for a constitutional amendment limiting House members to three terms (six years) and Senators to two terms (12 years). The USTL President said, "The American people are fed up with career politicians in Washington and strongly embracing term limits as a remedy. Gallup polling shows that 75% of Americans support term limits."

Opposing legal argument: [ACLU, Nov. 7, 2014]: In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (May 22, 1995), the Court ended the movement to enact term limits for Congress on a state-by-state basis. The Court held that the qualifications for Congress established in the Constitution itself could not be amended by the states without a constitutional amendment, and that the notion of congressional term limits violates the "fundamental principle of our representative democracy 'that the people should chose whom they please to govern them.'"

Opposing political argument: [Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 14, Feb. 18, 1992]: Several considerations may explain political scientists' open hostility to term limitation:

• Political scientists were instrumental in promoting the professionalization of legislators.
• They are cynical about the attentiveness, general knowledge, and judgmental capacity of the average voter.
• They are committed to the conservation of leadership.
• They perceive attacks on professional politicians as a threat to their own self-proclaimed professionalism.
• And political partisanship may encourage them to oppose term limits.