V
irginia
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apitol
C
onnections
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pring
2014
11
The idea of limiting elected officials’
terms isn’t new, but it seems to be
experiencing a renaissance inVirginia. In the
General Assembly session just concluded,
Delegate Joe Morrissey (D-Henrico)
patroned a bill that would have imposed 12-
year limits on General Assembly members.
Dave Brat, my colleague at Randolph-
Macon College who is challenging Eric
Cantor for the 7th District seat in the
U.S. Congress, is campaigning as “a firm
believer in term limits.” Every morning, I drive by the Mechanicsville
Tea Party’s sign encouraging people to sign Virginia Term Limits
Now’s petition to limit state legislators to two terms. (At the time
of this writing, doing so would be a challenge since Virginia Term
Limits Now’s domain name seems to have expired.) Watchdog.org’s
Virginia Bureau website notes that 80 percent of respondents to a
Hampton University poll last fall expressed support for legislative
term limits.
Proponents of term limits believe that the solution to what ails
government is to force turnover in the legislative branch. Their logic
is that the replacement of career politicians with citizen legislators will
lead to closer connections between elected officials and the people they
represent. They claim that citizen legislators are what was envisioned
by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, and that reducing careerism
will bring legislative bodies closer in line with the vision of government
espoused by the Founding Fathers. They argue that term limits promote
“good government.”
1
It turns out, however, that the Founding Fathers weren’t particularly
enamored with term limits. Although the Articles of Confederation
limited the number of years an individual could serve in the national
legislature (to three in any given six-year period), when they drafted
the Constitution the framers made the decision not to limit the terms
of elected officials. This was not simply an omission on their part;
rather, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 debated
the inclusion of term limits, particularly for the executive, and very
specifically voted them down. Convention Delegate Rufus King,
quoted in James Madison’s notes from July 19, 1787, summed up their
reasoning: “[H]e who has proved himself most fit for an Office, ought
not to be excluded by the constitution from holding it.”
Even had the Founding Fathers been silent on the issue, after
two decades of scholarly study of term limits, it is clear that term
limits are a spectacularly bad mechanism for improving government
accountability and responsiveness. A 2007 article in
Political Research
Quarterly
summed up the discipline’s conclusions on the issue, noting:
“[P]olitical scientists have studied the implementation of legislative
term limits in fifteen states and have documented a variety of negative
impacts: increased power of the governor, interest groups, and state
senate; less collegiality and civil discourse; more reliance on staff and
bureaucracy; more spending on elections; and less responsiveness to
the citizenry.”
2
In fact, virtually none of the arguments that activists make in
support of limiting legislative terms are borne out in the behavior of
term-limited legislators. Term limits do not make serving in the state
legislature less attractive to career politicians, they do not reduce the
propensity of politicians to make politics their vocation, nor do they
increase elective representatives’ responsiveness to constituency
concerns.
Legislative term limits
do
increase the power of other, non-
legislative elected officials at the expense of elected legislators. The
power and influence of lobbyists, executive branch officials, and
especially legislative staff expands dramatically when legislators’
terms are limited. The less experience a legislator has, the more he or
she has a need for experienced staff and the less able he or she is to
analyze critically the work products of lobbyists and executive branch
agencies.
Term limits also “handicap the party that was most successful in
the election that took place the term-limited-number-of-years ago.”
3
Depending on how things like redistricting have intervened, this might
have the paradoxical effect of more deeply entrenching and further
expanding the power of a legislative majority with whom the public
currently disagrees.
To the extent that term limitswould have the potential to do anything
at all to curb legislative careerism, the effects would be greatest in states
with highly professionalized state legislatures, which tend to breed the
career politicians that offend the term limits movement. But Virginia’s
General Assembly is already among the least professionalized of all
state legislatures, ranking 32nd out of the 50 states on the Squire Index
of Legislative Professionalism, well below both the mean and median
for the index.
4
Despite all this, Virginia is the latest battleground in the misguided
fight for term limits. TEA Party-backed candidates for office and
groups like Virginia Term Limits Now and Take Our Country Back
PAC are promoting the tired canard that the only good legislators are
term-limited legislators. While politically popular, two decades of
research by scholars in the field of legislative studies demonstrates that
term limits have a tendency to exacerbate existing problems especially
in places without highly professionalized legislative bodies.
Term limited legislators have less experience and rely more heavily
on pressure groups and staff to provide guidance and information when
making legislative decisions. Ultimately freed from the pressures of
being reelected, they are less responsive to their constituents in their
later terms. They may be less likely to face a challenge during an
election because prospective challengers will wait for a soon-to-be
open seat rather than run against an incumbent. (Ironically, this is one
of the problems in the current system that term limits advocates claim
will be solved by limiting members’ terms.)
Perhaps most unfortunately, term limits may negate the power of
elections to aggregate public preferences in a meaningful way. When
good people are prevented from running for office, the public may be
denied the ability to vote for the person with the most experience, the
best record of public service, or the best plan. The loss of an experienced
legislator may harm constituents more than it helps.
As Founding Father Roger Sherman noted, elections are our
insurance against the bad behavior of our legislators. Madison’s notes
from June 26, 1787 record him as saying:
Frequent elections are necessary to preserve the good behavior
of rulers. They also tend to give permanency to the Government, by
preserving that good behavior, because it ensures their re-election. In
Connecticut elections have been very frequent, yet great stability &
uniformity both as to persons & measures have been experienced from
its original establishment to the present time; a period of more than
130 years.
If we think our legislators are behaving badly, we can, and should,
work to see that they are voted out of office at the next possible
opportunity.
We already have term limits. They’re called elections.
1
Green, John C. Jesse Marquette, and Rick Farmer. 2006. A
ssessing
legislative term limits in Ohio
. Akron, OH: Ray C. Bliss Institute of
Applied Politics, University of Akron.
2
Weissert, Carol S. and Karen Halperin. 2007. “The Paradox of Term
Limit Support: To Know Them is NOT to Love Them.”
Political Research
Quarterly
, 60 (3), p. 516.
3
Carey, John M., Richard G. Niemi, and Lynda W. Powell. 2000.
Term
limits in the state legislatures
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
4
Squire, Peverill. 2007. “Measuring State Legislative Professionalism: The
Squire Index Revisited.”
State Politics and Policy Quarterly
, 7 (2), p. 220.
The Limits of Term Limits
By LAUREN C. BELL
Lauren C. Bell is Associate Dean of Randolph Macon College
and Associate Professor of Political Science.
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