It's the holiday tradition Lansing observes every other December:

• Lock 148 elected representatives in a couple of large rooms.

• Remind those assembled that more than a third of them will be out of their jobs in 30 days.

• Sit back and enjoy the fun as dozens of lawmakers with nothing left to lose take the $57-billion-a-year enterprise called the State of Michigan for one last, wild spin around the block.

What could possibly go wrong?

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In normal times, a healthy respect for voter opinion constrains most politicians from placing their own interests too far ahead of their constituents'.

There are always important donors and party leaders to appease, and the politicians' own personal ambitions to indulge. But so long as another election looms two or four years ahead, the fear of alienating voters deters all but the most reckless incumbents from serious mischief.

The danger arises during the frenetic four-week finale known as lame duck, when incumbents whose careers have been cut short by either term limits or electoral defeat return to work with the confidence that voters can no longer penalize them for anything they do.

At its best, lame duck is an opportunity to do things that are at once necessary and politically difficult, like raising garbage fees to pay for environmental clean-ups or salting away reserves that could see the state through the next economic downturn.

But this is also the hour of cynical horse-trading, petulant acts of revenge, and legislation tailored to the specifications of the majority party's most generous bankrollers — the twilight when a term-limited legislator's concern for constituents' goodwill gives way to greed, self-aggrandizement, and anxiety about post-legislative employment.

The end of accountability

Freeing legislators from the surly bonds of electoral accountability was always a risky proposition, even back when only a handful of state senators and representatives retired or were turned out of office in a given legislative session.

But since 2002, when the state House and Senate began feeling the brunt of the term limits Michigan voters adopted 10 years earlier, the number of lawmakers thrown out of work at the end of every legislative session has increased dramatically.

When a new legislative session begins in January, only 9 of the state Senate's 38 current members will return to office. The turnover in the state House will be proportionally smaller, but more than a third of its 110 representatives won't be back in the new year.

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The upshot, when allowances are made for term-limited House reps who've found a new lease on political life in the Senate, is that about one of every three legislators participating in this month's lame duck session is a free agent who faces no electoral consequences for whatever mischief the Legislature hatches.

That's way too many lawmakers with nothing to lose — and everything to gain — for supporting special interests who've favored them with campaign contributions in the past, or who offer the prospect of employment in their post-legislative future.

If Michigan can't acknowledge that term limits have turned out to be a failure (as nearly a third of the 20 other states that adopted term limits a generation ago have), we should at least limit the damage by forbidding the Legislature from doing business in the weeks after an election has of an election year.

Waddle, slash and burn

Just one week into their lame duck adventure, this year's outgoing legislative class has already demonstrated its contempt for Michigan voters and the politicians they've elected to represent them in Lansing starting Jan. 1.

Under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof (R-West Olive), who is term-limited, and House Speaker Tom Leonard (R-Dewitt), who was defeated by Democrat Dana Nessel in his bid to succeed Attorney General Bill Schuette, Republicans have already taken steps to eviscerate voter-initiated laws that would raise Michigan's minimum wage and guarantee paid sick-leave, to limit the authority of the incoming governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, and to exempt about 500,000 acres of environmentally sensitive wetlands from state protection.

Ken Sikkema, a Grand Rapids Republican who served as the state Senate Majority Leader during Gov. Jennifer Granholm's first term, says lame duck legislators have become more reckless as their numbers have increased in the post-term limits era.

"Can good things happen during lame duck? Of course they can," Sikkema says. But he adds that higher turnover has made the session "more dangerous" than it was when the vast majority of lawmakers knew they would eventually be accountable to voters in the next election.

Former U.S. Rep. John "Joe" Schwarz, a Battle Creek Republican who served four terms in the state Senate, is more emphatic.

"The dangers far outweigh the benefits now," says Schwarz, a retired surgeon who teaches political science at the University of Michigan's Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy. "It's Camp Run-amok."

Michigan voters demonstrated their zeal to clip state lawmakers' wings last month when they adopted Proposal 2, which will wrest redistricting from the Legislature's grasp and place it in the hands of a citizen's commission. The abolition of lame duck would be a logical next step for an electorate looking to make Lansing more accountable.

Brian Dickerson is the Free Press' editorial page editor. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.