What we see thus far suggests that term limits may increase turnover, strengthen executives, shift power from lower to upper chambers which tend to have longer terms , heighten partisan conflict, and increase reliance on experts, including staff and lobbyists.
At the very least, Congress would be wise to defer action on a constitutional amendment to limit congressional terms until these state experiments have a chance to play out and the results can be evaluated.
Thomas E. Mann Senior Fellow - Governance Studies. Recent developments thus provide no basis for reevaluating past opposition to congressional term limits. In many respects term limits advocates have already succeeded in their most important objectives. Voters are less passively supportive of their own representative. Candidates are increasingly self-limiting their own terms, opting as incumbents to leave earlier and as challengers to promise to spend only a short period of time in public life.
Changes in party control of the Congress are likely to be more norm than exception in future years. Reformers in both the House and Senate have taken steps to limit the automatic advantages of seniority. The president has been given a statutory line-item veto. Congress is grappling successfully with the budget deficit, thanks in part to the leadership of seasoned legislative leaders. But as countless students of Congress have demonstrated, the linchpin of the case for term limits—the desirability and feasibility of ending legislative careerism and returning to the citizen legislature originally conceived by the Founders—fails in every key dimension.
High turnover and amateurism in the nineteenth century Congress and in state legislatures did more to nurture parochialism, corruption, and special interest influence than enhance the public welfare. Professionalism is a necessary offshoot of the growth and specialization of the modern world. If the political rules are rewritten to make it impossible to build a career in Congress, then the institution will have to rely on the professionalism of others to do its job, whether they are staff members, bureaucrats, or lobbyists.
Finally, any effort to use term limits to replace careerists with citizen-legislators is likely to produce some combination of itinerant professionals with weak institutional loyalties and elite amateurs whose resources and connections make a brief stint in Congress possible and profitable. Term limits should be rejected not only because they would fail to achieve the objectives of their advocates.
Their danger lies in the harm they might do to American democracy, by limiting the freedom now enjoyed by voters to end or continue the career of representatives who seek their continued support and by weakening the first branch of government by depriving it of experienced and knowledgeable legislators.
Constitution, Article I, section 2, clause 1 The U. House of Representatives has been a popularly-elected body with its membership reconstituted every two years throughout its history. The biennial term was a compromise at the Federal Constitutional Convention, but there have been efforts as late as the s to change its length. The two-year term has dictated the rhythm of legislative business in the House.
English parliamentary elections and meetings of the House of Commons varied between three- and seven-year terms, but elections and meetings were set by the members themselves and often tied to the demands of the king.
House of Representatives About this object James Madison was an integral part of the constitutional framing of the House. Convention delegates contested the terms of service for Members of the House, and the founders employed their experiences with the House of Commons and the state legislatures when considering the design of the new federal government.
Two innovations designed to further democratic accountability separated the American and British experiences. The first was fixed terms of office. Unlike in parliamentary systems, American political parties could not call advantageous elections. Elections would be held according to a given length of time rather than when political leaders thought they would be most likely to win. The second innovation was regular elections. In most colonial and state legislatures, members of the lower chambers faced annual elections, while some were every six months.
Only South Carolina had biennial elections for the legislature. By remaining at the seat of Govt. Proponents of the one-year term used their state legislatures as an example, while proponents of the three-year term followed the British example at the time.
Those who wanted longer terms argued that national governments were more complex than state governments, and that one year was an insufficient amount of time for representatives to become acquainted with the policies and practice of federal government. Despite widespread support, instituting term limits would have numerous negative consequences for Congress.
Take power away from voters: Perhaps the most obvious consequence of establishing congressional term limits is that it would severely curtail the choices of voters. A fundamental principle in our system of government is that voters get to choose their representatives. Voter choices are restricted when a candidate is barred from being on the ballot. Severely decrease congressional capacity: Policymaking is a profession in and of itself.
Our system tasks lawmakers with creating solutions to pressing societal problems, often with no simple answers and huge likelihoods for unintended consequences. Crafting legislative proposals is a learned skill; as in other professions, experience matters. In fact, as expert analysis has shown with the recently passed Senate tax bill, policy crafted by even the most experienced of lawmakers is likely to have ambiguous provisions and loopholes that undermine the intended effects of the legislation.
The public is not best served if inexperienced members are making policy choices with widespread, lasting effects. Being on the job allows members an opportunity to learn and navigate the labyrinth of rules, precedents and procedures unique to each chamber. Term limits would result in large swaths of lawmakers forfeiting their hard-earned experience while simultaneously requiring that freshman members make up for the training and legislative acumen that was just forced out of the door.
Plus, even with term limits, freshman members would still likely defer to more experienced lawmakers—even those with just one or two terms of service—who are further along the congressional learning curve or who have amassed some level of institutional clout. Much as we see today, this deference would effectively consolidate power in members that have experience in the art of making laws.
Take, for example, the recent Sen. Durbin alliance that has recently proposed a bipartisan immigration compromise. Term limits would severely hamper the opportunity for these necessary relationships to develop. Strangers in a new environment are in a far worse position to readily trust and rely on their colleagues, particularly from across the aisle.
We have seen a semblance of this effect after Republicans limited House committee chairs to six years at the helm.
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