It makes a week today since 7th district Councilwoman Tonia Reyes Uranga announced she is running for re-election as a write-in candidate, and although I’m just now getting to it in this week’s Vector Control, my delayed reaction is still more timely than Long Beach’s ridiculous term-limit election rules.

According to that arrangement, Uranga isn’t allowed to appear on the ballot but is allowed to run for office. If she is involved in a run-off election, suddenly she is allowed to have her name on the ballot, which makes no sense. Not that I’m against Uranga running. Truth is, I think term limits are horribly un-American. But here’s the deal: if you’re going to have term limits, have term limits and not this game-show approach.

Now, some have told me forcing a candidate to run a write-in campaign is tantamount to term limits. That may have been true 10 years ago, but not anymore. The number-one problem in running a write-in campaign is simply getting the word out that you want people to write your name in. That’s not big deal in a local election, where politicians can target virtually every one of their constituents via the Internet. By Thursday, Uranga had already received a major endorsement from the Machinist and Aerospace Workers Union, which will get the word out to all of their people and certainly provide the organization to get the word out to many others.

Again, I have no problem with this—it’s just such a stupid way of governing. And whenever I run into something this dumb in government, I know exactly who to blame: YOU. Yes, the term-limit laws were approved by you, providing yet another example of the initiative process screwing things up. From Prop. 13 to Prop. 8, this business of having ordinary citizens in charge of writing laws has become a joke, literally—witness the current proposed initiative that would allow people to vote on making divorce illegal.

Look, we do not live in democracy; we live in a democratic republic, where we elect people to write the laws. If we’re unhappy with the job they do, we elect someone else. That’s how it works. The notion that a person who wouldn’t dream of telling a car mechanic how to do his job is somehow magically endowed with the ability to navigate the incredibly complex world of governance is ridiculous—scratch that; dangerous.

The Founding Fathers did not go around asking the general population what they wanted to see in the Constitution. If they had, I can guarantee you the First Amendment would have a lot more references to “gettin’ some.”

Tags: Founding Fathers, Long Beach, term limits, Tonia Reyes Uranga, Vector Control, write-in