Should Members of Congress be Subject to Term Limits?

It is a perennial debate in American politics. While an overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea, what effects would such a proposal have on our government? The answer is not as simple as most people believe.

The debate is older than our republic itself with term limits being implemented by the Romans. Our first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, limited delegates to the Congress to three years in a six-year period. So, one must ask, why did the Founding Fathers not include term limits in the Federal Constitution in 1787? The answer is that term limits were proposed in James Madison’s Virginia Plan, but that plan, while integrated into the Great Compromise, was changed to exclude such limits, as aptly explained by the Constitution Center’s Scott Bomboy. The delegates could not reconcile diverging opinions of the various states in attendance at the convention. The Founders settled on the idea that elections were term limits; if the people wanted change, they would be free to vote for it. Nevertheless, the states would later try to add federal term limits to their constitutions, after they had already adopted those limits for their own legislatures. But in 1995, U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton was decided, and in this 5-4 decision, SCOTUS ruled that states did not have the authority to enact limits for federal officeholders.

Now that we know a brief history of this debate, let’s consider a few questions. In a democracy where the ultimate power rests in the people to decide, what happens when we adopt term limits? One possible answer is quite simply to limit the freedom of the electorate to choose their representatives. Think about this from a business perspective: Imagine a board of directors is impressed with the performance of their company’s CEO. How would that board react if they were told there was a government mandate to dismiss the CEO after one term of five years, despite their performance? Voters are the ultimate arbiters of their elected official’s performance. Why should their choice of representatives be limited?

Imagine if the same CEO from our example knew their time at the company was almost over, would they have the same incentive to perform at their job? Extensive research has shown that this is one of the central problems in the term limit debate: Legislators on their way out of office have little incentive to perform well at the end of their term. “Elections appear to induce incumbents to allocate their effort toward observable measures of productivity; once term-limited, we have shown, incumbent legislators sponsor fewer bills, provide less committee service, and are absent for more roll-call votes, on average,” according to the September 2021 American Political Science Review. The authors’ findings included that while many legislators go on to run for other offices in their states or for higher national offices, many do not and thus have little to no incentive to perform at the same levels they had been.

Beyond concerns about choice and legislative performance, proponents of term limits have suggested that enacting these policies would reduce corruption by ending relationships between lobbyists and legislators that they perceived as harmful to the people, but did this happen? With less experienced legislators, research shows lobbyists hold more power than they did before the term limits took effect. Legislators admit increasingly to relying on lobbyists and partisan staff to educate them about issues they may not be familiar with. This is somewhat understandable as it is not possible for one legislator to be an expert in every issue. Before term limits, more freshman legislators could rely on the expertise of senior members. Today, those legislators are increasingly reliant on lobbyists instead. A 2018 report by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, which surveyed both current and former state legislators, found that after the adoption term limits in Michigan, many legislators reported that lobbyists became considerably more influential. “These sources are ones that are sometimes accused of being part of the swamp or establishment that term limits proponents railed against. Yet, the biggest change we found was increased use of these sources among post-term limits senators,” the researchers stated.

This piece urges voters to further explore this debate, and one should recognize that each state and the people of those states should adopt their own laws. Indeed, the Founding Fathers wanted each state to act as a laboratory where policies like legislative term limits could be tested, and if they failed, reformulated to meet the needs of the citizens. More research is needed to explore the potential for term limits to impact partisanship among legislators, with some researchers arguing that term limits have increased partisanship and others suggesting running for higher office disincentivizes bipartisan policymaking. Individual voters should educate themselves on term limits and their benefits and drawbacks so that, if they are called upon to decide this issue at the ballot box, they can do so in an informed manner.

Benjamin Fortin is an Instructional Designer for the Center for Excellence at Northwood University, where he also serves as an Adjunct Political Science Professor. This is the cover piece of the September edition of When Free to Choose, Northwood University’s signature publication dedicated to exploring the importance of limited government, free enterprise, and other tenets of The Northwood Idea. Click here to receive When Free to Choose in your inbox!