Benjamin Franklin once said that death and taxes are the only certainties in our world. If the esteemed founding father were around today, he would likely add fraud to the list. The risk of getting swindled is everywhere around us. Between investment schemes, identity theft and phony Nigerian princes, we live in a minefield of greed and dishonesty.
The government has set up several agencies to protect people from these forms of fraud, and they largely do a good job. But who protects the people when the scam is coming from the government itself?
That’s the question Arkansans must answer this November, when one of the most deceitful amendment proposals in American history will appear as Issue 3 on the state ballot for an up or down vote.
It all began in February 2013 when Arkansas legislators started to see the writing on the wall for their political futures. They were angry with term limits for the same reason citizens love them: Term limits block people from turning politics into a career. The challenge-staying in office beyond the legal limit-was a daunting one. Undoing a reform that 70 percent of citizens support is no easy task when the repeal has to pass a referendum.
Then it dawned on them. A doubling of term limits to 16 years in one seat could be slipped past the people if concealed in a different bill. It would have to be something positive, uplifting and completely unrelated to term limits. “Ethics” seemed to make sense. After all, who is going to oppose ethical behavior?
The bill was anointed “The Ethics, Transparency and Financial Reform Amendment of 2014,” and passed overwhelmingly in both houses. This term-limits rewrite-from 6 years to 16 in the House and 8 years to 16 in the Senate-was pushed back to page 16, beneath mountains of phony ethics changes. That way, very few Arkansas voters would know that their citizen legislature was getting shredded in favor of a haven for career politicians.
It was a masterful act of fraud, and one which earned the dishonor of “Outrage of the Year” in a Democrat-Gazette editorial.
The bill’s authors used phantom fixation, a key element of fraud psychology, to distract voters from their real intent. Criminal psychologist Doug Shadel writes that “the goal (of phantom fixation) is to focus on a particular prize or desire so that they will fail to carefully evaluate the rest of the offer.” By putting the focus on ethics, the attack on term limits can pass through undetected.
Many political scientists believe that the title of legislation is more important than the bill itself. Often it is the only thing people read. The long title of Issue 3 purports to be “establishing term limits for members of the general assembly,” even though Arkansas has had them in place since 1992. Those who aren’t aware of this fact will vote against their own views, and that’s precisely what the General Assembly wants.
When citizens stood up to expose the truth about this amendment, four legislators-David Sanders, Cecile Bledsoe, Gary Stubblefield, and Mark Lowery-publicly stated that they didn’t intend to vote for it but were recorded as “yes” votes anyway. In spite of citizen outcry, no investigation was ever opened into the legitimacy of the vote. The legislature paid lip service to keep critics quiet, but took no action.
The fate of the proposal now rests with the voters of Arkansas. Their civic duty includes not strictly voting this time, but also unscrambling a puzzle of deceptive ballot language left there by politicians. One can only hope that voters heed the FBI’s top lesson for fraud avoidance: “If it appears too good to be true, it probably is.”
Nicolas Tomboulides of Lake Worth, Fla., is executive director of U.S. Term Limits.
Perspective, Pages 82 on 04/20/2014