When Sarah Palin called herself a lame duck—in reference to her resignation from the governorship of Alaska—it struck me as an odd use of the term.  After all, she has two more years left to govern, meaning there are two legislative sessions that require her input.  What’s more, she could have run for reelection, meaning instead of assuming “lame duck” status, she could have ramped up her efforts to pass key legislation to boost her portfolio of achievements by 2010.

            In fact, there is only one state in the country in which a first term executive is always a lame duck: Virginia.  Article V of the Virginia Constitution reads that the executive “shall be ineligible to the same office for the term next succeeding that for which he was elected….”  Now, technically, this language allows a governor to serve as many terms as he is elected to; they simply cannot be succeeding terms.  This odd scenario happened once in the twentieth century: Mills E. Godwin served as a Democrat from 1966-1970 and as a Republican from 1974-1978.  But as a practical matter, no recent governor has attempted to reclaim his job—most have attempted (and all but one have succeeded in) running for the Senate.

            I wrote to Dick Howard, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia, asking why Virginia has remained the sole bastion of the single-term limit.  Here is his answer:

When I directed the most recent revision of the Constitution of Virginia, I laid this question before the Commission on Constitutional Revision.  The commissioners (who included two former governors, Colgate Darden and Albertis Harrison) chose to leave the one-term limit in place.  For my own part, I would allow a governor to run for a second term.  Virginia is now the only state in the country retaining a one-term limit.  The conventional argument, which I think overblown, is that Virginia’s governor is sufficiently powerful vis-a-vis the legislature that he ought not to have more than one term.

Democratic governors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine

            Upon ratification of Virginia’s first constitution in 1776, the executive was weak (like most governors, powers were mostly limited to commanding the militia and granting pardons) and was appointed to a one-year term, twice renewable, by the General Assembly.  The governor shared power with an eight-member Council of State, also appointed by the General Assembly.  In 1851, the governorship became an elective office, the Council was abolished, and the term became a four-year, non-renewable one.

            The legislature has made multiple attempts to raise a constitutional amendment to repeal the single term limit, but it has never been approved twice (two votes are required, before and after a general election) in order to be submitted to voters; the last attempt was made in 1995.  The argument against a renewable term is that Virginia’s executive has been strengthened with succeeding constitutions, now having line-item veto power and the ability to make some appointments.  Legislators would like to see the appointment power curtailed in order for the governor to be eligible for reelection.

            While recent governors, including Douglas Wilder, Jim Gilmore, and Mark Warner, support a two-term limit, at the time of the last constitutional revision (1970) there was no interest among former governors to scrap the provision.  With every passing election, this part of our Constitution becomes more and more archaic.  A single term provides no ratification or repudiation of the incumbent’s agenda by the voters.  The proxy measure of success is whether the next governor is of the same party as the incumbent, but think of how much more work could get done with the cultivation of relationships between legislators and civic leaders if one individual were to serve for eight years.

            Gov. Tim Kaine, for instance, has few legislative victories to boast of besides a smoking ban in bars and restaurants and a significant buildup of the Democratic Party machinery.  His campaign promise to fix transportation issues has gone unfulfilled, and he blames this impasse on an adversarial Republican legislature.  Furthermore, his last year-and-a-half in office has been consumed by steering the state through a recession—cutting budgets rather than implementing new policy. 

         And while few people will suggest that Kaine is not a hardworking executive (at least, compared with other governors whose personal antics or managerial skills have embarrassed their states), he already has a job lined up after his term expires—as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  That is something we can avoid with a renewable term: preventing the governorship from becoming a placeholder position on the road to bigger and better things.

         Virginia has myriad legislative battles to fight in the coming years.  But some time in the near future, I would hope that the General Assembly will see fit to give incumbent governors the ability to put their tenure on the line for voters to renew.  It could not only tame the parochialism in the legislature, but it could reward excellent managers with the ability to establish a more permanent legacy.