Senator Chuck Grassley, 92, at a recent town hall. Grassley entered Congress in 1975, after serving in the Iowa state house for 16 years. (Screengrab from video posted X.)
It comes, it goes, but seldom does a month go by without the notion of “term limits” popping up in the American political discussion.
At the moment — and since Sheldon Whitehouse proposed legislation for it in 2023 — that discussion has mostly revolved around the Supreme Court, whose justices remain in office, according to the Constitution, “during good Behaviour,” generally understood as “for life absent impeachment or voluntary retirement.” Whitehouse wants non-renewable 18-year terms.
Really, though, term limits are a perpetual panacea.
Congressional candidates talk about them a lot — usually when promising to serve no more than X terms in the US House of Representatives, and right up to the point where they decide to seek their X+1th terms “due to popular demand.”
The president is already limited to two four-year terms. That limit required a constitutional amendment to implement, as would House or Senate term limits and, arguably, Supreme Court term limits. Some would like to see the presidential version changed to a single six-year term.
I’m skeptical that term limits, as envisioned by their promoters, would do much to restrain or improve the quality of government, and as a political matter their opponents aren’t wrong when they point out that “we already have term limits, they’re called elections.”
At the state level, in Missouri, I watched what happened after legislative term limits became law. Instead of one person sitting in a state house or senate seat forever, we got a “ladder and rope” system with politicians climbing the ladder from local office all the way to state senate (and possibly the executive branch), term-limiting out and moving up to the next rungs, while throwing down ropes and pulling hand-selected proteges behind them and into the offices they vacated. Different faces, same ideas … and a more difficult system for outsiders to break into at all than if vacated seats became “open” in any real sense.
But if we want to give term limits a real try, I have some ideas on the matter.
First, the limit should be one term.
Second, the term should be fairly short – say, two years.
Third, once a person has been elected to a particular office, that person becomes ineligible for election to any other office, and for employment by any branch of the government in question … ever, for life.
That may sound extreme, but let’s look at the impact on the federal government (because it happens to be so, I’m treating local, state, and federal governments as separate governments), and include cabinet appointees and Supreme Court justices (even though they’re appointed rather than elected).
That comes to 561 people (435 US Representatives, 100 US Senators, one president, one vice-president, 15 cabinet secretaries, and nine Supreme Court justices).
With a population of 340 million, the US could fill each of those offices about 610,000 times. Single two-year terms and lifetime bans afterward wouldn’t lead to a labor shortage.
What it would lead to is more difficulty building perpetual political machines and an entrenched political class.
Which is why politicians would hate it.
