Philip Blumel: We are winning. Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement. This is episode number 272, published on October 13th, 2025.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: Last week, I was in New Orleans for a US Term Limits Summit, and I came back energized, and I want to tell you about it. We met in a hotel in the French Quarter. There were 26 of us in all. We had pretty much the entire staff, a couple of board members, and our chairman. Much of our operation is remote, so it’s really important to get together in the same room at least once a year as a group. This is when I can get a really good view of the operation. For our contributors that are listening, I want to remind you that I’m one of you. I’m president of US Term Limits, which today means that I’m the US Term Limits board member with the most hands-on interaction with the team. But this is not my day job. I’m a contributor like you. What I always want to know is, are my efforts and resources in this project a good investment? That is, are we on the shortest path to eventual success? Because frankly, if we’re not, I’m out of here. Life is short. Resources are limited. And I’m not involved in this project to raise awareness or because I need a job or because I want to feel good or look good. I want to win. I want to term limit the US Congress. I want to change the incentives in Washington, D.C. to give a chance to turn this country around. I want to make history. Don’t you? Right, so back to New Orleans. We had all our team leaders and all our field staff in one room. We heard about every facet of our operation, and we critiqued each. I got the big picture, and I’m psyched. I want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to shake people in the streets and tell them the news. Yes, we’re winning, and yes, we’re going to win. Now, I talk about the big metrics all the time on this podcast, but let’s start here for the newbies before I get into the weeds. In order to force an amendment proposing convention under Article V of the US Constitution, we need 34 states to approve a resolution applying for that convention from the states.
Philip Blumel: We have 12 so far, with six of them signing on in the last year and a half or so. Now, while the convention would be great, we’re quite confident that Congress will preempt a convention by taking action itself. Historically, that’s always been the case. So we always have the US Term Limits amendment introduced in both houses of the US Congress also and have a record number of sponsors and pledge signers in Congress on board, over 150. The US Term Limits pledge commits the Congress member to co-sponsoring and voting for the amendment. If you’re a regular listener, you know about these successes. And that’s enough to be excited and optimistic, but what makes me think that this momentum is going to continue to build? I’ll tell you. I heard regional reports from around the country about how we’re setting up for next year. And get this, we have signed pledges for majorities of both the State House and the State Senate in Utah, for example. You can be sure that Utah is on our target list for the 2026 season. In Georgia, we already have one house of the legislature approving the Term Limits convention resolution and the leadership’s on board were promised a vote in the other house, and we’re quite confident we have the votes. In Ohio, the US Term Limits state chair has been elected to the US Senate, Bernie Moreno. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis traveled there this year to speak to the Republican majority to urge him to vote for the resolution. It’s possible Ohio will vote to approve the Term Limits resolution before the end of this year. You get the idea. We went through state by state cataloging our progress in each. So yeah, I’m quite confident that more states are on the way. Momentum is increasing. We also talked about an interesting program that you might not know about. That is our state chairs program. We now have 28 state chairs and co-chairs in 25 states. What we do is recruit movers and shakers in each state. That would be Democrats in Democratic states and Republicans in Republican states, and then we’ll have Democratic and Republican co-chairs in the purple states. These are basically our spokespersons in these states. And wow, via op-eds in the major state newspapers and other public appearances, we calculate that we have generated millions of dollars of earned media and reached millions of people with the Term Limits convention message. These chairs provide great support to our lobbying team in these states trying to get the Term Limits convention resolutions passed.
Philip Blumel: And these state chairs will also go directly to the legislature to talk to legislators as well. Next, we talked about the improving tech that we’re using to quickly alert Term Limits supporters in the various states to contact the relevant decision makers at the perfect time prior to an upcoming vote in the state legislature. We don’t bombard legislators with junk. We make sure the decision makers’ constituents are the ones contacting them. That’s who they care about. We need to let them know that their own peeps are watching. We also discussed something that is, well, sort of a secret. It’s likely that the official announcement will be made before my next podcast. I hope so, because I’m tired of staying quiet. You could say, without giving it away, that we’re taking our state chairs program national. U.S. Term Limits has always operated without a lot of media fanfare because, frankly, we didn’t think that that was really helpful to our cause, especially early on. But that’s going to change with this announcement, so stay tuned. We are wrapping up this progress in a pretty new package as well. We’re launching a new gold and blue logo. You’ll be seeing that soon. And we’re revamping our website. The website will have more features and will be cleaner and easier to navigate. We’ll have special portals for candidates, lawmakers, and supporters. So, well, give us until the new year to go live with this, but you heard it here first. And, of course, we discussed fundraising. You can’t get anywhere without money. And this project is expensive. So, thank you, thank you, thank you to those who are financial contributors. Keep it coming. Winning states is proof of concept. We have a winning strategy, and we have figured out how to do it. Every new state is proof U.S. Term Limits is a good investment. As a result, more and more potential contributors are becoming actual contributors. If you’ve been on the fence, uncertain if we can deliver, well, U.S. Term Limits is delivering. Time to send us a check. Go online @termlimits.com/donate. Termlimits.com/donate. Press pause on this podcast and do it right now. We’ll wait.
Speaker 3: This is a public service announcement.
Philip Blumel: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis struck again on an episode of Mark Levin’s show on Fox News. You may know this story already, but the Governor’s skill in expressing it makes it worth hearing.
Mark Levin: What is the best advice that you could give the American people or Congress for that matter?
Gov. Ron DeSantis: Well, Mark, as you say, in Florida, we have the smallest state government per capita in the country. We have the second lowest debt per capita in the country. We’ve retired 41% of the state’s debt over 180 years, just since I’ve been governor. It’s gone off the books. We’ve cut taxes. We’ve done a lot of great things. But I don’t know that that could have been done if we didn’t have constitutional restraints on the legislature and on spending. So we have term limits in Florida, which I think is really important for legislature. We also have a balanced budget requirement. So I veto stuff. I vetoed 3% of the budget one year, and you’ve got to make tough decisions. And I would have done that anyways, but I’ll tell you, having that mechanism there to force those decisions is critical. So I don’t think we’re going to ever see Congress reform itself without constitutional reforms. And the founding fathers provided two different ways you could amend the Constitution or to propose amendments. You could do two-thirds of each house of congress, but they also knew that Congress may be the problem. And so if you needed to do an amendment that required two-thirds of Congress that was going to change incentives in that body, those members may not want to do that. So they allowed two-thirds of the states to certify an amendment via an Article V Convention of the States. In each instance, ratification of the amendment’s the same. It requires three-quarters of the states. And so I’m a believer that the states have a fundamental role right now in reforming Washington, and there are things you and I have discussed. I know you’ve written a book about this, and there are many things that need to be done, but clearly we need term limits for members of Congress. We’ve got to change the incentive from just trying to stay there forever to actually try to accomplish big things, take political risks, take heat to make tough decisions. The federal government didn’t create the states. The states created the federal government. It was the states that came together to create the U.S. Constitution, and we have a unique system where the federal governments are at least supposed to be few and defined, and the remaining powers to the states are numerous and indefinite. We play a huge role in constitutional change, and Article V is the mechanism that the founding fathers gave us.
Philip Blumel: Next, more billboards are going up, but some are coming down too. Politicians like to sign the U.S. Term Limits pledge on the campaign trail, but some try to renege once they’re in office. Now I should add, most don’t, but there are always some scofflaws, and one of the most cost-effective ways of alerting their constituents of this is the neighborhood billboard in their district. New ones we put up since the last podcast include U.S. Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida. This one really hits close to home for me, literally. I live just north of Sheila’s district. She’s in Delray Beach, Florida. She signed the pledge to co-sponsor and vote for the U.S. Term Limits Amendment, and yet refuses to get on the bill. Well, now she has a billboard up exposing her at Atlantic Avenue, just west of Congress. Others include Representative Monica De La Cruz of McAllen, Texas, and Representative Troy Nehls in Richmond, Texas. Scofflaw politicians hate these billboards. Now these billboards are clearly negative, but many times they have a very positive result. Sometimes the billboards are enough to put a fire under the politician to get them to live up to their pledge. And if a politician fulfills their pledge, even if late or under pressure, we will take the billboard down immediately, and there’s no hard feelings. I’m happy to say that we’ve had several recent examples of this. In fact, a couple of these names you’ll recognize from just the last episode of billboards we just put up. The new signers that used to have billboards are Representative Daniel Meuser of Pennsylvania, Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, Russ Fulcher of Idaho, and Nicole Malliotakis of New York. To all four of you, thank you, and welcome aboard.
Stacey Selleck: Like the show? You can help by subscribing and leaving a five-star review on both Apple and Spotify. It’s free.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. The Term Limits Convention bills are moving through the state legislatures. This could be a breakthrough year for the Term Limits movement. To check on the status of the Term Limits Convention resolution in your state, go to termlimits.com/takeaction. There, you will see if it has been introduced and where it stands in the committee process on its way to the floor vote. If there’s action to take, you’ll see a take action button by your state. Click it. This will give you the opportunity to send a message to the most relevant legislators urging them to support the legislation. They have to know you’re watching. That’s termlimits.com/takeaction. If your state has already passed the Term Limits Convention resolution or the bill has not been introduced in your state, you can still help. Please consider making a contribution to U.S. Term Limits. It is our aim to hit the reset button on the U.S. Congress and you can help. Go to termlimits.com/donate. Termlimits.com/donate. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
Stacey Selleck: Find us on most social media at U.S. Term Limits, like us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and now LinkedIn.