It’s a familiar refrain whenever the idea of imposing term limits on state legislators comes up.

“We already have term limits,” say opponents. “They’re called elections.”

House Judiciary Chair David Tarnas took the argument a step further when he derailed a term limits proposal last session by pointing to a League of Women Voters analysis stating 56% of Senate seats and 65% of House seats had turned over since 2012.

“At least for the past ten years, voters have already succeeded in limiting the terms of most legislators,” concluded the league’s Janet Mason in written testimony on House Bill 796.

Tarnas liked the league’s testimony so much that he read it aloud right before axing the bill without a committee vote.

There was one problem: While the league’s statistical analysis of total turnover may have been spot-on, its conclusion was not.

Starting with the same data used by the league, Civil Beat’s team of UH student interns went deeper into the reasons for departures of 72 state lawmakers since 2012. Losing reelection bids accounted for only 26 of those exits — 36.1%.

There’s been a decent amount of turnover in the Legislature over the past decade, but a big majority of those departing were not shown the door by voters.

Another 26 legislators left to take or at least seek other offices, 15 retired, three resigned and two died.

So yes, there’s been a decent amount of turnover in the Legislature over the past decade, but a big majority of those departing were not shown the door by voters.

“I’m very glad you did it,” Mason said of Civil Beat’s deeper analysis. “I think you discovered a valid point.”

This didn’t change her mind about opposing legislative term limits — a position the league also takes at the national level, Mason said.

That’s not the point. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to support or oppose term limits for state lawmakers. But let’s not pretend it’s a common occurrence for incumbents to lose to challengers.

Six legislative incumbents were ousted last year, although two of those lost to other sitting legislators as a result of the reapportionment of legislative districts that occurs once every 10 years.

It happened only twice in 2020 and once in 2018. The last sizable voter-imposed exodus was in 2012 when nine incumbents lost — but that was another reapportionment year and again some of them were defeated by fellow incumbents instead of newcomers.

The fact is, Hawaii legislators can pretty much serve as long as they want.

Over the past decade, an average of 90% of incumbents were reelected during each election cycle, wrote Colin Moore in a report released in February for the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.

And while many legislators do leave their seats voluntarily for various reasons, some of the most powerful ones do not.

Term limits aren’t the only way to break the stranglehold that legislative powerbrokers have on public resources.

House Speaker Scott Saiki, for instance, is the longest-serving representative at 28 years. House Finance Chair Kyle Yamashita is tied for third-longest-serving at 16 years.

Their counterparts in the Senate haven’t been in a legislative office quite as long — 13 years for President Ron Kouchi and 12 years for Ways and Means Chair Donovan Dela Cruz. But that’s plenty of time to amass campaign war chests — Dela Cruz has the biggest with $945,719 as of Dec. 31.

“Since 1994, incumbents in the Hawaii House spent $57,883 on average in each election, while challengers spent only $16,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars,” according to Moore’s UHERO report.

Term limits aren’t the only way to break the stranglehold that legislative powerbrokers have on public resources.

Two other approaches — expanding public financing of campaigns to level the playing field and lengthening the legislative session to cut down on closed-door shenanigans — were also rejected last session.

All three merited more open, fact-based discussion than they received.