Back about twenty years, the Republicans somewhat startlingly captured control of the US House of Representatives, a body they had not been dominant over for decades. The rout was so complete that the reigning Speaker, Tom Foley, was defeated in the State of Washington for his own district.
The strategy behind the Republicans centered on the "Contract with America", a set of principles stating what the Republicans would try to do if they took the House. Among the Contract's planks was that of implementing limits on the length of time a Senator or Representative could serve. I don't recall if the objective were two Senate terms and six in the house, but it was something like that. We certainly have had some voluntary term-limiting, some individuals agreeing in advance to serve only a certain number of terms and declining to run thereafter, but in general little has changed.
The typical reasons for promoting the concept of term limits seem to center on encrustation -- too many people there for too long, corrupting them; or proponents feel that the purpose of service is not a lifelong seat in Congress; or the risk that they lose touch with the taxpayer whose money they spend. There is a host of reasons for this concept.
I want to point toward one specific one, though it is seldom mentioned.
Congress does its work under the committee concept. Ways and Means handles budgetary concerns; Foreign Relations works with State matters; Armed Services works with the military, etc. The committee chairmen are powerful individuals whose availability for assignment as chairmen is driven by and derives from one key attribute -- seniority. And therein lays a powerful reason to promote term limits.
We have suffered through the impact of judicial rulings which suggest that congressional districts can or must be revised to ensure majority-racial composition. The presumption, which should make our skin crawl, is that "black districts" (which universally vote far left) are needed in order to ensure that there are black congressmen. That, of course relies on the further presumption that people should be represented by those of their own race, which is more contemptible when you realize that the USA is perfectly capable, even without court direction, of electing a president whose father came here from Kenya.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (which sometimes trumps gravity) applied thereafter; with black voters concentrated in certain districts, they were in turn carved out of whatever district they were in, pushing those former districts further to the right as the new districts were pushed to the left. As a result, both districts became less heterogeneous and more "safe", and the more-entrenched congressmen became more liberal or conservative to match their newly-polarized constituency. Ta-da, instant polarization and gridlock, thanks to your court system meddling.
Look at the result one more time: polarized, long-seated congressmen. Keep that thought for a moment.
So term limits ... the power in Congress is held by those who are around the longest and achieved the seniority whence comes the committee chairmanships. The seniority is achieved by those in the safest (meaning "most left and most right") districts. In the Senate, where the "districts" are the whole states, the power is in the most politically homogeneous states -- reliably leftist states such as Massachusetts, California, New York, and reliably conservative states such as Idaho, Utah and Mississippi. A senator in one of those states can serve 30 years -- many have -- and have plum committee chairmanships for years.
So if the expectation of the Founders in creating a bicameral legislature was to provide equivalent representation to all citizens of all states, then I have a problem. A state like Florida, which has a mix of viewpoints in its populace and can send either party's candidate to the Senate, ends up without long-serving senators, while Idaho or California voters can have far longer-serving senators. With the power accruing to the long-tenured through committee chairmanships, the voters of Florida are less-capably and less-powerfully represented in Congress, and are accordingly being punished for their heterogeneity.
In this argument, it is not so much the term length as the seniority system that is the culprit, producing largely unequal representation dependent on one's address. Term limits would necessarily impose some type of replacement system for doling out key positions -- and how many years someone had been able to persuade his constituency to send him back would no longer be a factor in their representation. More importantly, incumbency for incumbency's sake would no longer be a campaign strategy -- "I will be powerful and can bring home the pork" goes away.
Let's think that one through, shall we?
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
