A recent Gallup poll found 85 percent of respondents disapprove of Congress’ work. Reports suggest about 90 percent of people think term limits will align Congresspersons’ incentives with the common good. They won’t.
In the 2024 general election, incumbents won reelection more than 90 percent of the time; it’s 100 percent in some election cycles. If elections were truly competitive, incumbents would not win at that rate. Freed from competition, legislators’ incentives to are not aligned with the public good.
The main culprits are partisan primaries, gerrymandered House districts and the role of private money in politics. Hence, incumbents are heavily insulated from competition for their seats. Once initially elected, legislators basically are immune to the will of voters and have de facto life-time tenure.
Term limits seem to be a logical fix for Congressional dysfunction. (Dysfunctional for us, very functional for Congress members.) Congresspersons will not change their behaviors unless their incentives change.
The Supreme Court’s 1995 Thornton decision prevents individual states from imposing term limits. Congress would have to pass term limit legislation. Because they would kill their Golden Goose, that bill would be DOA.
But let’s pretend term limits are imposed. Then we have to think about whether they would change Congress’ incentives in helpful ways.
Advocates claim they would work by eliminating incentives which lead legislators to serve private, moneyed interests rather than constituents’ interests. The question is would those new incentives align legislators’ behavior with constituents’ interests.
Given the all-important role of money in politics, Congress folks bend to the will of private interests which fund campaigns and feather their nests. Fans of term limits argue legislators would be freed from greed if they were limited to, say, two terms.
Here’s why term limits won’t work. Facing them, legislators would have incentives to use their limited terms currying favor with private interests in the hope of getting a plumb job after leaving office. Therefore, incentives would be essentially the same as now and legislators’ behaviors wouldn’t change. They would still work to ingratiate themselves to private interests by passing legislation favorable to those interests just as they do now. The specific private interests might be somewhat different but legislators would still be more interested in working for private interests than working for voters.
Nearly everyone believes in competition, or says they do. If competition works, and it does in many instances, how about creating effective competition for seats in Congress? My favorite way of doing so is eliminating partisan primaries and replacing general election, plurality voting with ranked choice voting. But that would also be DOA, just another way to kill the congressional Golden Goose.
Patrick Taylor lives in Ridgeland.
