Moreno’s Congressional term limit scheme puts 30-year federal bureaucrats who create rules to circumvent laws in control of our government

CLEVELAND, OH – What stands out on the US Term Limits website is the reason its out-of-state promoters want Ohioans to support term limits for members of Congress as a constitutional amendment. Elitist-minded political opportunists who see themselves as the “best and brightest” minds are not winning against incumbents; and the losses are limiting their personal career goals.  To win the jobs of a member of Congress for themselves they want an advantage.  The selfishly-motivated, elitist words below were cut and pasted from the out-of-state US Term Limits website as written.

“The best and brightest minds in our states, currently blocked from serving in Congress by tenured politicians, would finally have the opportunity to move upward and make their case to the American people.”

New York real estate entreprenuer Howard S. Rich wants Ohioans to back his constitutional amendment to limit congressional terms in office.

In Ohio, car dealer and withdrawn U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno joined Howard S. Rich’s US Term Limits as a state director in March 2022.  He is asking the Cuyahoga County Republican Party’s central committee to support a congressional term limit amendment to the United States Constitution.  The board of US Term Limits wants U.S House of Representative members limited to three, two-year terms in office.  U.S. Senators will be limited to two, six-year terms in office.

“Now more than ever before, the need for term limits is crystal clear,” Moreno declared in a news release that announced his US Term Limits affiliation.  “Polls show that the one issue all Ohioans regardless of political affiliation are united about is the need for congressional term limits.”

“Serving in Congress has become for many, a lucrative lifelong job rather than a public service. Term limits will help end career politicians and make Congress work better for all Americans.”

To make the U.S. Constitutional Amendment a reality, Rich’s New York based organization must get 34 state legislatures to approve a resolution calling for a constitutional convention.  Only five state legislatures have approved the congressional term limit resolution Moreno wants Ohio Republicans to back.  The procedure is authorized under Article 5 of the Constitution of the United States of America.  38 state legislatures would need to approve the term limit resolution in order for it to be ratified by Congress.

Published reports describe Moreno associate Rich as a New York real estate developer who lives in Philadelphia and practices Libertarian politics.  A term limit constitutional amendment is not a national Republican initiative.

Officials of Rich’s Votenet were federally-investigated for stealing from his online voting company.  In October 2006, Public Integrity reported that Rich’s Americans for Limited Government was cancelled by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan because its registration under the state’s charitable trust laws was delinquent and not in good standing.

To support his rationale for term limits, Rich’s US Term Limits website offered a report from a New York University associate professor named Mona Vakilifathi.  Vakilifathi admitted how past research Rich also added to his website has shown that term limits reduces bureaucratic oversight by lawmakers.

Vakilifathi chose to ignore past research, however, for her own sketchy opinions in a 2017 report she authored that’s entitled, “Constraining Bureaucrats Today Knowing You’ll Be Gone Tomorrow: The Effect of Legislative Term Limits on Statutory  Discretion.”  It’s her first report of the 3 scholastic reports she’s published since 2017 that are listed on Research Gate.

Mona Vakilifathi’s 2017 term limit research paper is being promoted as if it’s legitimate by US Term Limits.

Vakilifathi’s resume doesn’t show any government management experience so her opinions are not inspired by hands on knowledge.  Her scholastic conclusions were drawn from an examination of charter school laws in 42 states.  She claimed to have reviewed statutes that guided each state’s procedures for authorizing, renewing and revoking charter school licenses to learn if they contained mandatory or permissive language.

She used the data to deduce without evidence that legislators who knew their time was limited were more aggressive in writing laws with language that held charter school operators and bureaucrats accountable. What Vakilifathi did not investigate was if charter school laws were written by legislators on their own; or under the guidance of wealthy and lobbied-up private charter school operators.

On November 3, 1992, Ohio voters enacted term limits for state lawmakers. Four, two year terms for state representatives.  Two, four year terms for state senators.

In Ohio’s early school voucher/charter school days the late attorney David Brennan’s lobbyists got him the laws he wanted from term limited legislators.  Brennan founded Hope Academy and Lifeskills charter schools.  A 2014 investigate report in the Akron Beacon Journal described Brennan’s power over Ohio’s term limited legislature in the following words:

“Documents obtained by the Akron Beacon Journal show that state officials often delivered new laws and policies that aided Brennan in the building of his chain of schools. Some of those officials bent rules — or rewrote the rules — to his benefit.”

Vakilifathi’s report completely ignored legislative dramas like the $60 million First Energy scandal for which former Ohio Speaker of the House, Larry Householder, and four lobbyists were indicted by the United States Department of Justice.  Rich’s US Term Limits website fails to explain how 6-year members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and 12-year members of the U.S. Senate, will master the nuances of a complex federal bureaucracy enough to enact or support legislation that holds 30-year career federal employees accountable.

Term limits did not stop ex-Ohio house speaker Larry Householder’s from packaging the biggest bribery deal in history for himself in conspiracy with other term limited lawmakers. $60 million.

One of the bureaucratic realities Vakilifathi’s report did not address is how it’s the career federal department heads who submit budgets to Congress for oversight and approval; and who decide how and if federal laws are enforced.  Just because Congress enacts a law doesn’t mean it’s enforced as written by the federal workers and recipients the laws instruct.

Inspector generals, the Government Accounting Office and Congress’ hearings were created as oversight tools federal lawmakers use to identify and attempt to eliminate the obstructive internal policies bureaucrats secretly enact to circumvent federal laws.  In H. Abbie Erler’s “Legislative Term Limits and State Spending,” the researcher notes that state budgets are higher in the term limit states and lower in states without term limits.

In 2013 federal lawmakers learned the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Exempt Organizations Unit, that was managed by director Lois Lerner, was denying tax exempt status to conservative named corporations and non-profits.   She also contemplated targeting U.S. Senator Charles Grassley for an audit.  Congress’ oversight committee referred her to the USDOJ for criminal prosecution.  Lerner retired.

It was Grassley’s relentless demand that the FBI and USDOJ enforce the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act which finally led to its enforcement in 2017 with the investigation launched by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  Internally, under ex-FBI Director James Comey, the Logan Act, Espionage Act and Foreign Agents Registration Act were ignored until Donald Trump’s presidential administration.

In Cuyahoga County the prosecuting attorney, Michael O’Malley, and Cleveland’s mayor, Justin Bibb, have decided to violate Article 1.18 of the Constitution of Ohio by suspending the enforcement of abortion laws.  The term limited state lawmakers who enacted Ohio’s heartbeat law now have to adjust it to punish criminally derelict local officials who don’t have the constitutional authority to suspend a law by not enforcing it.  If the majority of supportive state senators and state representatives who backed the abortion law are term limited out of office, voters can’t expect newly-elected state lawmakers to take up their predecessor’s interests.  The learning curve for legislators who are new-on-day-one lowers the functioning capacity of the entire legislative body.

Confucius Institute unregistered Communist Chinese agent Jianping Zhu was appointed as CSU’s provost when Bernie Moreno served on the board.

During his 7 years on Cleveland State University’s board of trustees, and two years as its chairman, Moreno provided no high-functioning legislative oversight of the agreements university bureaucrats entered with officials of Communist China to receive foreign money for a Confucius Institute.  CSU’s low-functioning board of trustees had absolutely no curiosity about whether or not employees were violating the Logan Act, Espionage Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act when they communicated with the Communist government’s officials.

EJBNEWS, as an example, has been reviewing the personnel files of CSU’s H1B visa workers that don’t include requests or approvals for them to work from the Department of Homeland Security.  During Moreno’s 7-years on the board, the minutes show CSU’s low-functioning trustees did not question bureaucrats to learn if they were justifying the need to hire foreign workers over Americans and validating their immigration documents.

Moreno supported the appointment of Chinese national Jianping Zhu to the office of provost for six years. His personnel file does not include US Department of Homeland Security requests or approvals for his employment and promotions as he was allowed to hire over 200 foreign and domestic workers.  Instead of returning to China after concluding his studies, Zhu stayed and worked.

Two years after Moreno’s 7-year term expired, CSU received August 2020 correspondence from the United States Department of State that declared its Confucius Institute to be a foreign mission of Communist China.  CSU’s Communist Chinese Confucius Institute employees had always worked as the unregistered foreign agents of an unregistered foreign mission; and were required to register with the U.S. Department of State and USDOJ. The federal correspondence confirmed that Moreno and other lax CSU trustees had allowed bureaucrats like Zhu to ignore federal espionage, work visa and immigration laws.

It is the type of failed legislative oversight that CSU’s board of trustees exhibited, which Rich, Moreno and Vakilifathi ignore, that is not ignored in past term limit research.  In the 2006 report, “The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States,” four American researchers drew the following conclusions after examining all 50 states.  The thoughts below are from a third report on Rich’s US Term Limits website.

“We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.”

In a study guide titled “Controlling the Bureaucracy,” authors further underscored how elected legislative officials Moreno, Rich and Vakilifathi want to weaken have been locked in a forever struggle with corrupt career bureaucrats.

“Historically, at least since the end of the spoils system, elected leaders have struggled to maintain control over their bureaucracies. This challenge arises partly due to the fact that elected leaders tend to have partisan motivations, while bureaucracies are designed to avoid partisanship. While that is not the only explanation, elected leaders and citizens have developed laws and institutions to help rein in bureaucracies that become either too independent, corrupt, or both.”

Eric Jonathan Brewer

Cleveland's most influential journalist and East Cleveland's most successful mayor is an East Saint Louis, Illinois native whose father led the city's petition drive in 1969 to elect the first black mayor in 1971. Eric is an old-school investigative reporter whose 40-year body of editorial work has been demonstrably effective. No local journalist is feared or respected more.

Trained in newspaper publishing by the legendary Call & Post Publisher William Otis Walker in 1978 when it was the nation's 5th largest Black-owned publication, Eric has published and edited 13 local, regional and statewide publications across Ohio. Adding to his publishing and reporting resume is Eric's career in government. Eric served as the city's highest paid part-time Special Assistant to ex-Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White. He served as Chief of Staff to ex-East Cleveland Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor; and Chief of Communications to the late George James in his capacity as the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's first Black executive director. Eric was appointed to serve as a member of the state's Financial Planning & Supervision Commission to guide the East Cleveland school district out of fiscal emergency and $20 million deficit. Former U.S. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson told Eric in his D.C. office he was the only mayor in the nation simultaneously-managing a municipal block grant program. Eric wrote the city's $2.2 million Neighborhood Stabilization Program grant application. A HUD Inspector General audit of his management of the block grant program resulted in "zero" audit findings.

As a newspaper publisher, Eric has used his insider's detailed knowledge of government and his publications to lead the FBI and state prosecutors to investigations that resulted in criminal prosecutions of well-known elected officials in Ohio; and have helped realign Cleveland's political landscape with the defeat of candidates and issues he's exposed. Eric's stories led to the indictments of the late Governor George Voinovich's brother, Paul Voinovich of the V Group, and four associates. He asked the FBI to investigate the mayor he'd served as chief of staff for public corruption; and testified in three federal trials for the prosecution. He forced former Cuyahoga County Coroner Dr. Elizabeth Balraj to admit her investigations of police killings were fraudulent; and to issue notices to local police that her investigators would control police killing investigations. Eric's current work has resulted in Cuyahoga County Judge John Russo accepting the criminal complaint he guided an activist to file against 24 civil rights-violating police officers in the city he once led for operating without valid peace officer credentials. USA Today reporters picked up on Eric's police credentials reporting from his social media page and made it national.

Eric is the author of of his first book, "Fight Police License Plate Spying," which examines the FBI and local police misuse of the National Crime Information Center criminal records history database. An accomplished trumpet player and singer whose friendship with Duke Fakir of the Four Tops resulted in his singing the show's closing song, "Can't Help Myself": Curtis Sliwa of New York's Guardian Angels counts Eric among his founding chapter leaders from the early 1980's role as an Ohio organizer of over 300 volunteer crime fighters in Cleveland, Columbus and Youngstown, Ohio. For his work as a young man Eric was recognized by Cleveland's Urban League as it's 1983 Young Man of the Year.

Known in Cleveland for his encyclopedic knowledge of government and history, and intimately-connected with the region's players, every local major media outlet in Cleveland has picked up on one of Eric's stories since 1979. There is no mainstream newspaper, television or radio outlet in Cleveland that does not include an interview with Eric Jonathan Brewer in its archives over the past 40 years.

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