Not These Guys Again! The Case for Term Limits
At NBCNews.com, I make the case for term limits in a video sidebar to Meet the Press.
For those who prefer print, I summarize my argument here (not all of which survived NBC’s editing):
Only 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress’s performance. Yet we’re about to have another election where more than 90 percent of incumbents are reelected. In fact, the most common reelection rate for House members over the past 30 years is 98 percent.
98 percent reelection — that’s what you expect to see in Russia, not in a democracy.
Americans don’t want a permanent ruling class of career politicians. But that’s what the power of incumbency and all the perks that incumbents give themselves are giving us.
We want a citizen legislature and a citizen Congress — a government of, by, and for the people.
To get that, we need term limits. We should limit members to three terms in the House and two terms in the Senate. Let more people serve. Let more people make the laws.
And let’s get some people who don’t want to make Congress a lifelong career.
Some say that term limits would deprive us of the skills of experienced lawmakers. Really? It’s the experienced legislators who gave us a $17 trillion national debt, and the endless war in Iraq, and a Veterans Affairs system that got no oversight, and massive government spying with no congressional oversight, and the Wall Street bailout.
Politicians go to Washington and they forget what it’s like to live under the laws they pass. As we’ve seen in some recent elections, they may not even keep a home in the district they represent.
The American Founders believed in rotation in office. They wanted lawmakers to live under the laws they passed — and wanted to draw the Congress from people who have been living under them.
For more on term limits, see the Cato Handbook for Congress, Ed Crane’s 1995 congressional testimony, or this very thoughtful article by Mark Petracca, “The Poison of Professional Politics.”
