Scratch One Poisonous Panacea
The term-limits movement is dead, and it should be. Requiring a lawmaker to leave Congress after a set number of years is the single worst idea to infect American politics in recent memory.
So who killed it? The very same Republicans who campaigned on the issue in the early ‘90s and, in some cases, actually took a pledge to quit Washington and go home.
Republicans carry a paper-thin margin of six seats into the 2000 election for the House of Representatives. And with nine GOP Congressmen still in office who promised to retire before then, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee is ardently urging them to break their word.
“When you have a six-seat margin, incumbency is more important than ever, and 2000 is going to be a dog fight,” admits Jill Schroeder of the GOP campaign committee. “We want to hold our empty seats to a minimum.”
One of the nine is Scott McInnis of Colorado, who was first elected in 1992 while promising to serve only “three or four” terms in Washington. He has now become a fierce foe of term limits, even warning prospective GOP candidates to “learn from my experience” and avoid self-imposed retirement.
“If you’re going to serve your district,” he told us, “and you’re term-limited, you render yourself politically impotent.” He’s absolutely right but it’s taken Republicans awhile to learn that lesson.
Term limits was always a cynical scheme, created by Republican strategists frustrated by the Democrats’ autocratic 40-year rule over the House. The power of incumbency was so vast, they reasoned, that the only way to dislodge the majority was to force them out of office and create open seats Republicans could win.
But the idea was fueled by an even more insidious concept - that politics is inherently corrupting. The minute lawmakers land in Washington, Sodom-on-the-Potomac, their integrity starts to crumble. After a few years, goes this argument, they’re hopeless moral misfits who must be replaced.
To their own surprise, Republicans took control of the House in 1994 without the help of term limits. And in one sense, their decision now to turn against the concept is an act of breathtaking hypocrisy.
As Schroeder acknowledges, the GOP doesn’t want to give up the advantages of incumbency - the exact same advantages Republicans denounced so furiously when Democrats enjoyed them. After all, last November, only six House members were defeated, and more than 98 percent of those who ran for re-election won another term.
Meanwhile, the booming economy has helped dispel the anti-Washington, “throw-the-bums-out” mood of the early ‘90s, so Republicans reason that they will pay no price for backsliding. “Voters don’t care about term limits,” says Schroeder, “it’s way down on the list of things people vote for.”
Some Republicans, at least, are motivated by more than political self-interest. They have come to understand that term limits is a profoundly wrong-headed idea under any circumstances, that running the government is a demanding professional career which requires training and tenure.
Rep. George Nethercutt of Washington, one potential GOP retiree, admits that six years in Washington “is not long enough” to learn the ropes. Rep. McInnis is even more candid, conceding that he made a huge mistake when he got caught up in the term-limits craze that “seemed to be sweeping the country” in 1992.
“As soon as I got back here, I thought, `what have I just done to my district?” he recalls.
McInnis represents a mountainous region whose major resource, water, is highly coveted by California. The only way a small state like Colorado can stand up to a big state like California, he says, is for its representatives to acquire seniority and important committee assignments. Under term limits, seniority is largely meaningless, so the big states will always win.
“You can’t walk into this building unarmed,” says McInnis, who recently won a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. “And that’s exactly what you do with term limits.”
There’s a larger point here as well. Any lawmaker, from any state, profits from experience. One example, says McInnis: When you first get to Washington and an interest group deluges you with mail, “you panic, you think the whole world is coming down on you.”
But after awhile, he adds, “you realize the mail is computer-generated and you balance your decision with a little maturity. You can’t take away that maturity.”
The term-limits movement is fighting back, pressuring the nine Republican to keep their promises and go home, and a few have agreed. But the larger fight is over. It’s time to play taps for term limits and we say good riddance.