But politicians resist term limits, the most popular idea to help do that.
But politicians resist term limits, the most popular idea to help do that.
A lot of polls have been taken in the run-up to Thursday’s anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, and they make for sobering reading.
A CBS/YouGov poll finds that 68 percent of respondents see the January 6 attacks as “a harbinger of increasing political violence, not an isolated incident.” Many people on both the left and the right have become cynical about government. Pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me that his surveys consistently show that only about one in four Americans think their government has the consent of the governed, a central tenet of our Declaration of Independence.
“For a nation built on the belief that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed, this is a real problem,” he says. He believes that President Biden made a fundamental mistake is pursuing a dramatic set of policy goals, given that six out of ten voters at the time of his inauguration said he should focus on restoring trust and confidence in our system of politics. A majority of every measured demographic group places a higher priority on restoring trust rather than on policy goals.
Many commenters have ideas they claim will help rectify this trust deficit. Democrats advanced an election “reform” bill, but it was so partisan and sweeping that it didn’t attract a single GOP backer in Congress. Republicans haven’t made many concrete suggestions for restoring trust, and merely mouthing Trump-style populist slogans won’t add much.
Winston Churchill is said to have once observed that “you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” Wouldn’t it be nice if the elites of both parties recognized that after 50 solid years of declining trust in our institutions, perhaps they should reluctantly go along with an idea that is consistently popular with Americans across the board?
I’m thinking of term limits, which currently apply to the presidency and 38 state governors; such limits were on track to become the law of the land in the 1990s and were stopped only by a 5-to-4 vote of the Supreme Court, which ruled that states cannot impose qualifications for members of the U.S. Congress stricter than those specified in the Constitution. The decision invalidated the strict congressional term limits passed by voters in 23 states. Many legal and political experts believe — as with the constitutional amendment in 1913 according to which U.S. senators must now be elected by popular vote — that without the Supreme Court ruling, Congress would have passed a term-limits amendment to avoid even stricter state limits.
Both liberals and conservatives back term limits, with the idea gaining recent support from liberals who have discovered they want to limit the tenure of Supreme Court justices. The Washington Post reported in December that President Biden’s commission to study structural revisions to the Supreme Court found that term limits were the “one potential change both Democrats and Republicans have said they could support.” A November poll by Marquette Law School found that 72 percent of Americans favored fixed terms for justices over lifetime appointments.
Surveys show even greater support for term limits for members of Congress. A Rasmussen poll found that 82 percent of respondents favored a constitutional amendment to mandate term limits. Term limits are supported by at least two-thirds of every demographic group, and there is no partisan gap in support. They are the most bipartisan issue a pollster can find — supported by 87 percent of Republicans, 83 percent of Democrats, and 78 percent of independents.
One reason for such bipartisan backing is that both parties are suffering more than ever from hardening of the seniority arteries in Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 81 years old. Her deputy, Steny Hoyer, is 82 years old. The No. 3 House Democrat is Jim Clyburn, who is 81.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the spring chicken of the bunch. He turned 71 in November. Schumer’s deputy, Senator Dick Durbin, is 77 years old. Among Republicans, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turns 80 next month, and he has been in elected office continuously for 45 years.
Despite the bipartisan nature of the support, don’t expect Democrats to be eager to back term limits — even for the Supreme Court, from which they fear a wave of conservative decisions. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts thinks a term-limits constitutional amendment is slow and cumbersome: “It takes years to work through the state legislatures,” she told the Washington Post. Instead, this month she came out in favor of adding “four or more” justices to the Supreme Court by congressional action.
As for Republicans, Donald Trump also doesn’t appear committed to backing term limits for Congress, though he nominally supports them. He mentioned the issue only once during his entire presidency, in a 2018 tweet.
What neither Warren nor Trump realizes is that there is a way to promote term limits — for either the Supreme Court or Congress — that doesn’t involve politicians killing or mothballing the idea. U.S. Term Limits (USTL) is leading an effort to have state legislatures call for a single-issue Article V convention to propose a term-limits amendment. Using this strategy allows the term-limits movement to bypass Washington entirely, eliminating the conflict of interest in having members of Congress decide on term limits. So far, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, and West Virginia have passed resolutions to call a constitutional convention on term limits. USTL has also led state legislative chambers in Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah to pass term-limit resolutions.
The reason for the term-limits movement is simple: It’s popular. The popularity of term linits continues to be demonstrated at the ballot box. In the 2020 elections, USTL conducted voter-education campaigns in 190 state legislative districts where at least one candidate had signed a pledge to support the Article V convention. In these races,
— 139 out of 190 pro-term-limit candidates won.
— 73 out of 83 pro-term-limit incumbent candidates won reelection.
— 22 out of 43 pro-term-limit candidates won despite challenging incumbents.
— 44 out of 64 pro-term-limit candidates won in open-seat races.
In other words, of those incumbents who opposed a term-limits convention, a majority still lost. That is remarkable, given that 95 percent of all state legislators running for reelection in 2020 won.
Term limits also work at the state level. In 2014, Republican Bruce Rauner defeated an incumbent governor in deep-blue Illinois by running an entire campaign on term limits. In 2018, Republican Rick Scott did the same to knock off Democratic U.S. senator Bill Nelson, who had first been elected to office in 1972. Rauner and Scott both committed tens of millions of dollars to term-limits ads, which proved decisive in close victories.
In the Senate, Scott (along with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas) is a lead co-sponsor for a term-limits amendment that would establish a limit of three House terms and two Senate terms. It has 75 co-sponsors in the House and 16 in the Senate.
Smart presidential candidates in the 2024 election will be casting about for some way to convince the American people they can restore trust in our institutions. Obviously, few of those elite circles will think or dare to embrace term limits.
But if a candidate did run on them — a Democrat for limits on the Supreme Court, or a Republican for limits on Congress, or even on SCOTUS and Congress — he or she could carve out a distinct and attention-grabbing niche in the presidential race.
Pundits debate whether 2024 candidates will take “the MAGA lane,” “the anti-Trump lane,” “the AOC lane,” or “the moderate lane.” But the term-limits lane has no current occupant, and anyone who takes the on-ramp to join it could find himself benefiting from a hidden competitive advantage.