Politicians don’t like term limits. That’s why New Yorkers have had to go to the polls — twice — to impose a maximum of two terms in office for the city’s elected officials in separate referenda. In defiance of the clear will of the people, however, the City Council has fought aggressively to extend the time they can live on the public dole. Particularly, the City Council’s speaker, Gifford Miller, who could find himself out of office along with five other council elders as he prepares for the next mayoral election in 2005, has made it his mission to preserve his position.

By a margin of 46 to 2, Mr. Miller and his henchmen on the council passed Local Law 27 over Mayor Bloomberg’s veto, overriding the limits set out by voters. New Yorkers went to the polls in 1993 to approve by a wide margin a City Charter that limited all city officials to two consecutive, four-year terms in office. They went to the polls again in 1996 to clear up an is sue with regard to the City Council: City Council members, who usually serve fouryear terms, sometimes serve two-year terms when they are elected directly after a census (in order to quickly adjust the city’s representation to redrawn districts); voters decided that these abbreviated terms should count as full “terms” under the charter.

Local Law 27 simply says that the two-year terms don’t count — meaning that some council members can serve as long as 10 years. To uphold the law as adopted by the referenda, a former council member and current state senator, Martin Golden, a 2001 council candidate, Felipe Luciano, and a Republican, Jeffrey Livingston, have taken the City Council to court. So far, they have been successful. Judge Gerald Rosenberg last week agreed with Messrs. Golden, Luciano, and Livingston that Local Law 27 violates the charter and struck down the law. “The enactment of Local Law 27 without referendum is inconsistent with the historical practice of enacting term limit legislation by referendum,” Judge Rosenberg’s decision states. The council has already announced it will challenge the ruling.

For those who wish to see the voters’ intent carried out, it can only be hoped that the appeal will not gain any purchase in the higher courts. As Mr. Bloomberg said in his letter accompanying his veto of the law: “The same citywide electorate that has honored both the City Council and me by placing its trust in us also voted for term limits, and then voted to retain them.” No one in a position of power is likely to restrain their own power, that is why the founders of this country did so much to limit the power of the Congress, and it is why term limits at the national level have never made progress despite wide popular support for the idea.

Where term limits take root, it is as a result of an effective process of referendum. New York City has such a process, and the citizens have made use of it. The quality of the council may not have improved much — it has managed in just the last year to pass a draconian smoking ban, a hefty property tax increase, an onerous increase in excise taxes, and, most recently, a resolution opposing the war to liberate Iraq — but it represents the end of a democratic process. That term limits may shorten some politicians’ careers, or place a bump in Mr. Miller’s path to Gracie Mansion, is no reason to undermine that process.