The Tenacious Allure of Term Limits

Nelson Lee Walker is a retired engineer who has developed a passion for Congressional term limits, and he’s certainly not alone. His advocacy site lists more than a dozen other sites/organizations fighting the same fight.

What’s more, despite the failure of the idea to gain traction, it has a healthy populist appeal for many voters. After all, if we can term limit the President, why not members of Congress?

As with every good idea, this one has its fair share of detractors who constructively argue that term limits limit experience – and in Washington, experience counts. Besides, unlike Congress, the President is a power of one, and any power of one rightly deserves greater limits on his or her power than does one Senator among dozens, or one Representative among hundreds.

Those who have, as I have, spent time working the halls of Congress will appreciate both sides of this debate. We have encountered members of Congress whose tenure has lasted well past their useful range. We have also experienced the frustration of working with rookie Members whose passion is admirable but whose inability to understand the complexity of an issue or affect change within the rules of the institutions is frustrating – killing many good causes on the vine of naiveté.

Perhaps there’s a balance: term limits that provide enough time for experience to grow and affect change but not so much time that corruption and senility can set in. And that’s one of the major rubs on this idea: How do you quantify a limit that’s enough? Should it be eight years like the President? That might work for the House, but not the Senate, else they’d serve a term and a third, and changing that dynamic (from a six-year term to four or two) might prove even more elusive. So maybe it’s eight years in the House, 12 years in the Senate? Then again, if we follow the rule that the greater the concentration of power, the shorter the grace period should be, the Senate with its even one hundred Members should probably be limited to less time than the House with its several hundred Members.

And the slicing and dicing of the debate goes on from there.

The other major rub on term limits is the simultaneous resignation and sense of empowerment that sets in after voters accomplish what they did in the 2006 mid-terms, where they proved once again that, motivated by enough disgust, they can in fact boot out many long-timers, as former Senator Conrad Burns (among others) learned the hard way.

Still, despite all the tussle and roe over the details, there’s a part of me that is rooting for Nelson Lee Walker and his like-minded counterparts – a part of me that is still perhaps idealistic enough to find the concept of citizen policymakers (versus career politicians) a dream worth pursuing, even if it takes years if not decades to implement.

If you share Nelson Lee Walker’s passion for this fight, please pay him a visit, and check out the other term limit sites to which he links.

(Cross-posted at Central Sanity.)