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It’s not really fair to expect everyone to have an up or down opinion on a candidate within a week of their campaign being announced. For that reason there should be nothing surprising about the fact that Bob Lonsberry is not sold on Mike Lee (yet). As he aired his minor reservations with our latest 2010 Senate candidate he got talking about term limits – because Mike Lee thinks we should have a term limits amendment (perhaps like this one) – and Bob’s position completely failed to add up. At first I was planning to just comment on Bob’s site, but I felt that this deserved a full post.
There is a disconnect between Bob’s position on term limits and what he says later in his article. Here’s what he thinks of term limits:
Yes, people serve way too long in Congress. Yes, we have a professional political class right now. But the insinuation that the era of the Founders was much different doesn’t stand up to the test of history. Several of the Founders themselves held elected office for years on end. Some for the majority of their lives, and our Republic was benefited by their service.
And any person with Mike Lee’s knowledge of the Constitution must understand that an amendment mandating term limits would go against both the letter and the spirit of what the Founders wanted. Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections. And if Mike Lee, or someone else, can pose a viable alternative to Bob Bennett, and convince voters of that fact, the Constitution’s existing system for replacing politicians will work perfectly.
Later he makes this statement which exposes the weakness of his position:
I’m also bothered by Mike Lee’s age. Not that a 38-year-old can’t serve well in the Senate, but that he’s got so much life left. True, he is saying that people shouldn’t make a career of Washington, but so too did the two current Utah senators, both of whom have since made a career of Washington. Everybody running against incumbents is against long tenure in office. And everybody running for re-election believes in experience and seniority.
My concern is that at 38, Utah could be biting off something it will take 30 or 40 years to chew. I’m nervous about that.
The one selling point for 76-year-old Bob Bennett is that, at his age, he’s got a built-in term limit. He’s also, as they say, the devil you know. (emphasis added)
In case you missed the disconnect, Bob says that the founders already established a way to limit terms through regular elections and then worries that we might be stuck with Mike Lee for 40 years because he’s relatively young.
Here’s the half-truth that opens up the heart of the problem:
Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections.
It’s true that term limits limit the freedom of voters by eliminating the option to elect a president they like to a third term (to use our existing term limit as an example) – that’s the only freedom of the voters that is being limited. The problem is that the freedom of voters is already severely limited by our lack of term limits because of our political environment where potential candidates often choose not to challenge an incumbent, especially within their own party. For proof of that just look at how many more candidates tend to run for open seats. With term limits we would lose the option to vote for an incumbent after a set time, but we would gain so many candidates who currently choose not to run against an incumbent.
Bob claims that the founders did not want term limits and he’s probably right (although I doubt they ever addressed the issue to prove that conclusively) but they didn’t want parties either (they did make that clear) and we have parties anyway. The party system without term limits makes the regular election cycle a very weak way to limit terms – especially in a place where one party is dominant. Bob says that if someone can pose a viable alternative to an incumbent and convince voters of that fact then the system works perfectly. The question is, how can that happen when the potential candidates remove themselves from consideration because of the system that tilts heavily in favor of incumbents? And what makes a viable candidate? If a viable candidate is one that has the capacity and interest necessary to tackle the issues and do the job of a senator then I am a viable candidate. If a viable candidate is one that voters are likely to believe in that I am nowhere near viable. The first one should be the criteria, and if it were we would have lots of viable candidates for any office.
In a nation that probably has 80 out of 100 senate seats safely in the hands of one party or another and only about 20 seats that actually have a reasonable chance of changing hands from one election to the next the method of limiting terms that the Founders established is virtually impotent. The era of the founders may not have been much different than our era but it was different in some important ways. In this environment the Founders might find term limits to be a very reasonable method to ensure that the voters had the maximum amount of choice in candidates.
