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One year ago today I pointed out that the subject of term limits becomes popular after an election. Like clockwork it came up again this year. Jim DeMint jumped the gun a bit by announcing three weeks ago that he would introduce a term limit amendment. Yesterday he introduced the bill and today I read an opinion by Mark Tapscott on why he thinks it will actually happen this time.
In previous posts on the subject we have usually had some good discussions, but they tend to be the same from year to year. I’ll summarize the previous discussions in hopes that we can start a step or two down the road and have a more advanced discussion by doing so.
The discussion that we usually have boils down to the fact that term limits deal more with a symptom of our broken system rather than a cause but that treating that symptom might help to promote the curing of some of the underlying causes. Those who oppose term limits often argue that the people should be free to keep their same representatives as long as they want – but that thinking seems to obscure the fact that the position should always be greater than the person holding it and that society and the political system benefits from regular turnover so that we can’t mistakenly think that the junior senate seat from Utah somehow belongs to Bob Bennett, or that the senior senate seat from Massachusetts was some inalienable right for Ted Kennedy until his death.
4 replies on “Term Limits for All”
Yeah, more than 85% of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all say that they like the idea of congressional term limits. But it’s actually not very high on the priority list for most voters. So, while the issue is a popular sound bite thing, I’d be very surprised to see it get enough traction to even come close to passing.
Perhaps we need to find a way to move it higher on their priority list.
I heard a brief clip of Michael Medved today talking with a caller to his radio show. He isn’t in favor of term limits for three reasons.
1) It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to pass term limit legislation.
2) It seems more like a gimmick than a real solution.
3) He believes that there are no examples where term limits have produced significantly better results than not having term limits.
He is in essence saying that you don’t get much bang for your buck in passing term limits. I’d very much like to see some objective analysis of Medved’s third point. We should probably answer questions such as:
1) Do term limits actually help much.
2) Are some implementations are better than others. If so, what is different about them?
3) Do term limits become more effective if they are coupled with other types of efforts.
Those are some good questions. I have to admit that term limits have the potential to be nothing more than a gimmick – after all, it’s always possible to elect a series of incompetent or corrupt candidates rather than stay with the same one forever virtually ensuring that they will become corrupt even if they did not start out either incompetent or corrupt.
I’m fully confident, based on what we have done without term limits, that we would be no worse off having them than we have been without them.