So, yesterday I slogged about why I hadn’t slogged about the Massachusetts Senate race and its potential impact on HCR, Obama’s presidency, and the orbit of the earth around the sun: Burn-out at a system which is broken. I promised to make a liberal/progressive case for term limits for Federal office-holders, and that appears after the jump. Those who think I’m just a whiner, please go see Xanadu or something.
Republicans wanted—or said they wanted, when the Dems had reliable control over the House back in the day—term limits in order to rein in Federal power. Their hypocrisy was palpable, as the vast majority of pols elected on a platform including self-imposed term limits continued to run for re-election, and no actual attempts were made to create real term limits on the Federal level. Constitutional Amendments are a bitch, and that’s what this would require.
And I have no expectation that it will happen, but being an American I have a slight tendency towards Utopian idealism, so here’s my idealist rationale for term limits of 4 terms for Representatives and two for Senators.
Besides the fact that if eight years/two terms is enough for a President (though the R’s woulda loved having Eisenhower or Reagan, and the D’s Clinton, get a third term) it oughta be enough for a Rep or a Senator, term limits would help make lawmakers more likely to the right thing for the country rather than the right thing for re-election. And to those who point out that Elections are Term Limits, consider the gerrymandering and other factors that favor incumbents.
When politicians are primarily motivated by getting re-elected, they have every motive to cave in to media bullshit, loud minority opinions, and generally not get things done. If politicians knew going in that they had 8 or 12 years at most in their jobs, and they were presented with tough choices (public option or not? Fund a crazy pre-emptive war or not?) the calculus of re-election would not matter as much. Final term office-holders could do what they honestly thought was right since they weren’t going to be running for re-election in any case. And in their not-yet-final terms, they also would not be looking ahead to maybe being Speaker in ten or twelve years, or maybe Majority Leader someday.
The usual counter-argument (expressed in comments yesterday) is that experienced legislators are better at their jobs. In response, I cite the last roughly 18 years of experienced legislators fucking things up beyond belief (remember that even in Clinton and W’s lowest moments, they were more popular than Congress). The experience that comes from being around Washington forever might not be the best thing. For the nuts and bolts of House and Senate rules and so forth, hey, that’s what Aides are for. If an incoming Rep or Senator doesn’t know How a Bill Becomes a Law, he or she can hire staff that do.
We’d still have a professional political class: Reps would aim to become Senators, as they do now (and there’d be some reversal on that: Senators would run for Rep positions). But even if they had a full run at each office, in 20 years, they’re back home looking for another way to make a living.
Other reforms would of course make this easier: re-districting done by impartial judicial panels instead of state legislatures, full public funding of all campaigns (to eliminate the Millionaire Senator Phenomenon), and perhaps even expanding the House (set a minimum population number for a Rep—the population of the smallest state—and as the national population as a whole grows, add more reps where the people are, instead of swapping the 435 around as population shifts). This last would slightly balance the fact that the Senate gives proportionally more representation to fewer people, allowing, as Gail Collins recently pointed out, the Senators of 10 percent of the population to stop HCR.
But the reason I’m despairing is that this will NEVER happen. Whenever a political class has every motivation to maintain the status quo, it will do so. Unless the Democrats get a spine implant, the Republicans will continue to derail and distract, and then when they’re back in power, they’ll continue to fuck this country up even more than spineless Dems do. If we’re bankrupt in a decade or two, then perhaps real systemic change will take place, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Neither will I completely opt out. In the hopes of keeping Illinois a two-D Senator state, I’ll be voting on February 2 for the one Democrat who can run against Mark Kirk and not be tarred with the Dirty Chicago Obama Politics Brush (David Hoffman, former Inspector General, a city watchdog on Chicago city government—forced out of the position for doing it too well by Mayor Daley. . . a great credential if you ask me). And I’ll read the papers. But I’m not going to invest a lot of intellectual energy or emotion anymore. It’s just too much.
As the horrendous Bush years ground down, I simply could not stomach the national political scene and focused more on local and regional issues. When Obama came along, I was elated, and paid much more attention to national issues – finally, something positive will happen!
Lately, I’ve been re-focusing on those old local and regional issues. What a cluster-fuck the “other Washington” has become. I also would favor term limits, and agree that passage is unlikely – one more thing for me to just keep barely visible on the old radar.
I never imagined I would feel this way with so many democrats “in power” but I’m back to just scanning the national headlines and hoping that something, something, positive will happen with this new administration……..
After getting your Ass toasted we’d thought you’d get the hint…..
I don’t understand how anyone not in office can be against term limits.
Talk about living off the government teat, Congress is almost nothing more than an embarrassing nursing home.
Not to say I disagree with your premise, but another argument against term limits is that it will essentially hand the keys over to entrenched bureaucrats in the executive branch
Yeah 3, remember when Grassley told somebody looking for affordable health insurance like his to get a job with the Federal Govt. They are essentially the largest union in the country, but the Republicans hate unions.
Anyway, here in Charlotte we have a Teabag sub group called GOOOH. Seriously, GOOOH! But they want you to pronounce it “go” and it stands for Get Out Of Our House. Two terms for Reps, and the kicker is they have to promise to come back and live in their district under the laws they passed. That’ll cure everything.
@4 Entrenched bureaucrats already run much of the actual business of government, in the CBO, various executives and so forth. Would it be so bad if they ran Congress too? Don’t think so. Remember what happened, too, when Gonzalez, Rove and Cheney/Bush tried to politicize the Justice Department. Non-partisan bureaucrats would be fine with me.
I would think that the politicization of Justice would be an argument AGAINST term limits, not for, as term limits would interfere with Congress’ ability to act as a counterweight. The top jobs in the bureaucracy are always going to be political appointees regardless of what happens with term limits.
I just don’t fucking care. Term limits are only used to get well-financed greedmeisters elected instead of the incumbents. Always.
And those people then go on to serve more terms than they said. Always.
So fuck term limits.
Grow a pair and use the majority in the House and Senate you have – the Constitution worked perfectly well for more than 200 years with a majority vote in the Senate that the VP was tiebreaker for – fuck cloture and force the whiny babies to stand up and filibuster while we egg their houses.
Now go fuck off and tell the 10 percent of America represented by the 40 or 41 GOP Senators they’re a bunch of fucking whiny morons.
CA has term limits, and the legislature is even worse of a mess than Congress. Not that term limits really deserve the blame for that, but forcing popular incumbents to run against each other for one senate seat just increases campaign spending and doesn’t help anything. People don’t quit politics, they just get elected for a different position.
@9 sf_gal identifies the key problem. It all turns into one longer wrangle over the next position, and on top of that, it doesn’t have the desired effect. Look at the California legislature. It was dysfunctional when it started, but with term limits it became dysfunctional and lacking anyone with the capacity to get anything done. I detest Willie Brown as much as the next person (and he was a disaster as mayor of San Francisco), but there is no denying he was a damn good Assembly Speaker (hell, four years after he was limited out of the Leg, I was ready to go collect signatures to overturn term limits to send him back to Sacramento: 1) to get him the hell out of SF and 2) to get the Leg functioning again–this slide into oblivion didn’t happen overnight but it did start with term limits and Brown leaving the Assembly).
Term limits are an awful idea. As #s 9 and 10 show, they often make things worse, not better. In CA, there is now a new Assembly Speaker every two years. This has caused the government to ground to a halt. There is no institutional memory now. There is also a lack of experience.
And yes, experience does matter. Every progressive cause that has ever been accomplished has occurred because of years of hard work and are often the result of legislative leaders strong arming their members.
Term limits have several unintended consequences:
1) It makes the executive branch stronger than the legislative. This is especially true in places like CA where governors are around longer than legislators.
2) It makes unelected staff members powerful.
— power is often taken from elected officials and given to staffers (the ones that work there for years and know the system). New elected officials are uncertain of themselves so they do what their long term staff tells them.
Besides this, I’m against term limits as a matter of philosophy. If you don’t like an elected official then throw the SOB out. It’s the citizens’ job in a democracy to do this. If the public gets too lazy then they get what they deserve.
Plus, there are plenty of good politicians out there, who are there for the right reasons. Those are the people I want to remain in office (if they hold the same philosophy of government that I do).
We don’t need term limits. What we need are strong leaders.
What we need is an LBJ or a Sam Rayburn or a Jesse Unruh or a Tip O’Neil.
CA Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh:
“If you can’t drink a lobbyist’s whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don’t belong in politics.”
“Other reforms would of course make this easier: re-districting done by impartial judicial panels instead of state legislatures, full public funding of all campaigns (to eliminate the Millionaire Senator Phenomenon), and perhaps even expanding the House (set a minimum population number for a Rep—the population of the smallest state—and as the national population as a whole grows, add more reps where the people are, instead of swapping the 435 around as population shifts).”
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I like the term limits idea too.
9,10,11: The CA legislature is dysfunctional because it’s even less representational than the Congress. Only 40 senators for a state of 36 million people? Only 80 reps? Shameful.
Also, keeping term limits relatively long (~12 years, rather than the 6-8 in CA) would help minimize your complaints.
You want to lose Barney Frank? (Where’s Kucinich been since Obama’s election, btw.)
Maybe just term limits for Illinois?
Will @8 wrote “the Constitution worked perfectly well for more than 200 years…”
Except for that little episode in the mid-19th century where the constitutional system failed, war broke out, hundreds of thousands died and the country was split, north and south, and remains split to this day. Yeah, except for that, it’s a howling success.
A few points.
[a] If you want term limits, then by implication, you should never vote for a long-serving incumbent in a primary. Could you really do this? If you lived in Cleveland, would you actually vote against Kucinich just because he’s the incumbent?
[b] Term limits would undoubtedly push more power into the executive and judicial branches. Some commenters have claimed that this is a good thing. This is a deceptive argument, since if it’s true, the implication is that the more experienced branches will be better at governing. And if experience does produce better government, then term limits (which are specifically designed to remove experienced candidates) can’t possibly improve government.
[c] Term limits force politicians to move up or move out, but as many commenters have noted, there will be a lot of moving up. If you really want this, a more effective strategy might be to have a mandatory government retirement after, say, 12 years of national service. This would mean that once you’ve worked 12 years in any combination of federal positions, whether as an elected legislator or a bureaucrat or a judge, you are given a pension and barred from working in the federal government for the rest of your life. Note that I very much do *not* think this is a good idea, but I do think that it’s better than term limits on specific offices.
The real answer, I believe, is that there are much more effective reforms that have many of the advantages and none of the downsides of term limits. As you pointed out, a bigger House, impartial redistricting, and public financing of elections would be great. Other (admittedly much bigger) reforms could include proportional representation / multi-member districts, eliminating the filibuster, or even abolishing the Senate (hey, I can dream…). These all sound outlandish, but I don’t believe term limits are any more likely to see the light of day.
(As an aside, the NH House has 400 representatives. The federal House has 435. Surely we can accommodate a few more…?)
I totally agree with you, I think it could go a long way in making more realistic goals. However I think the underlining problem is campaign finance, and while I’m not sure we’d have much republican support public financing of all elections would be the best way to go. There’s no need for private money to try to sway the election, in any capacity. So matter how long they’re in office, it’s way more important for them to be working for the citizens and not just the people who open up their checkbooks. I don’t really mind if a member of congress is there for 100 years, I only care how they got the money to maintain their position.