Term Limits: Up The Bar

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Everybody loves to hate every other district’s and state’s incumbent Representatives and Senators. I also find it hard to like my own, but ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran is just his own special snowflake. Seniority matters, and informs just how much pork a politician can bring home. Thus, mounting a primary challenge to an incumbent is voting against local short-term interests, for all purging corruption is certainly a global, long-term Good Thing.

Whattayagonnado? Term limits are a brutally simple, readily verifiable tool for ensuring turnover. At the same time, you’re telling people they can’t vote for that one exceptional politician who, in contrast to the others, isn’t a pus-laden bag of fail.

One parameter that could be massaged to find some middle ground here is the margin of victory. If re-election to a seat took an additional, cumulateive percentage of the vote, say 3%, then politicians could still win re-election, but have to demonstrate worthiness to do so.

Given VA-8 as an example, Jim Moran took 61.0% in 2010. In 2012, he took 64.6%–so far, so far. The proposal here is that, to continue to clutter the U.S. Congress with his debris-like presence, he should require 67.6% of the vote in 2014.

There are any number of variations on this theme:

  • the bar starts at 50% with initial electoral victory,
  • the accumulation rate/amount,
  • only do it for primaries, &c

The real point of this post is that our current quasi-aristocracy needs revisiting.

69 comments

  3. The worst thing about our system is the fact some one can have a politlcal career. No one should be able to have that. Ending pensions for such would be a very good way to do just that. Force them to scratch for their retirement like everyone else, and a lot of what goes on will end very quickly. Terms limits with no pensions at the end would be a very good thing. What are idiots like Peter King, Reid, McConnell, Pelosi, and Zer0 doing that should be rewarded.

  4. I say that Representatives should be barred from more than 5 terms, and Senators from more than 2. Unless they want to reinstate the 17th amendment and allow state legislatures to put in their senators, like it was meant to be.

    For reps, by the time they hit 8-10 years they are captured by Washington and using their position for re-election, not to do the People’s Business.

  5. I think the problem is that the further entrenched, venal, corrupt and repulsive, the political class becomes, the less likely it is that meaningful change inside the system can occur.
    When the choice is between Senator McDouchebag and Rep O’Dickhead over who gets to steal everything not super glued down, eventually the whole stinking mess collapses on itself and we get a government we won’t recognize. See Weimer Germany as a model.

  6. The root of the problem lies in politicians who know NOTHING else. They’ve never run a business, most of them have never had a job IN a business; it’s been government work since graduation. I recommend that no person may be allowed to run for any political office unless at least 50% of his work experience since graduation has been in a for-profit, non-governmental position.

  8. Jim Moran can count on the votes of Federal employees solely because he always supports their annual pay raises. And, the largest number of his constituents are Federal employees and Federal contractors.

  9. Moran? Hah! Mine is Bobby Scott. This dude doesn’t even need to campaign, just file the paperwork and make sure the church vans are fueled up on election day.

  10. I disagree: folks like Moran already do insider trading, on top of a salary and retirement and guest speaking gigs. Without the legal cash, folks like Moran and Reid would go deeper into the well of Hell for cash and do even worse things.

  11. Good metric, but I can see how it can be gamed.
    Repeal the 17th Amendment, and take away Congressional Ethics rules – insider trading is illegal for everyone else, as is murder, theft, drunk driving and so on. The current rule that permits anything so long as 1 other person benefits is pure self-serving license to commit crime.
    We would not have a Reid, or a Moran, or many others by enforcing the law. That is term limits enough. If the people want to send the same people to Congress, that’s their choice.

  13. 1. Why not increase the minimum age to run for elective office of any kind? It would make it a good deal more difficult difficult to have a purely political career a la Charles Schumer and Debbie Wasserman Schulz. Suggest age 39 by default and age 32 for municipal court judges and local councils in jurisdictions with populations below a certain minimum.

    2. Require anyone with an occupational taint running for a legislative office to petition or stand at a convention with an understudy. State and county chairmen would have to submit their full slates to their respective boards of elections. Any slate for which the number bearing an occupational taint exceeds 20% would be subject to a lottery to determine which tainted candidate is replaced with his understudy. The tainted occupations would be: 1. member of the bar and 2. public employee. You could shed the taint by adhering to some other occupation for a term of years. N.B., this would make it difficult to attain office if one’s previous occupation was legislative staff. No more Trent Lotts, please.

    3. Require mandatory retirement. Judges in New York are compelled to submit to biennial review after age 70 and cannot serve at all past age 76. Begone, Louise Slaughter.

    4. Rotation in office: no representative serves more than 8 years in 12.

    5. Quadrennial terms for the House of Representatives.

    6. A practice manual for the delineation of districts and an end to a requirement of strict equipopulism. Strict equipopulism commands discretionary delineation. Rules based delineation is possible if you remove the requirement that districts be strictly equipopulous.

    7. Ordinal balloting. This would remove the impediment to 3d party candidates, as their supporters could simply mark a major party candidate as a 2d choice.

    8. An option of ‘None of the Above’ if a candidate is unopposed. Should ‘none-of-the-above’ win, a special election should be held in five months with the losing original candidate debarred.

  14. I just do not understand why anyone fancies this will do any good. You get Sen. Dede Scozzafava, cornhusker kickbacks, and Louisianan purchases.

    Suggest we replace the Senate with a colonial-style privy council elected by the House of Representatives. The function of such a council would be to vet and recompose proposed administrative rules and to undertake inquiries.

  15. No, just a plain term limit. A politician with merit will find higher-level offices to fill.

    But a higher priority should be given to a Real Residency requirement. Every member of Congress should be required to sleep 183 nights per year in the state he pretends to represent…not inside the Beltway, with the occasional visit to the tax peasants who have no real hope of replacing him.

  17. One difficulty with this idea is that seniority would be even more concentrated in the members from the least variegated and least competitive districts. John Conyers has been in Congress since 1965.

  18. I will wager you having the state legislatures elect the Senate given the political culture and habits of our time will mean that federal policy will have as its strongest vector the imperative to confer bon bons on state legislatures. Call it ‘d’amatoization’.

    Suggest two ideas to replace that:

    1. Have only spare delegations in Article 1, section 8. Wipe the elastic clause, the commerce clause, and the general welfare clause. Allow supplementary delegations in an organic law composed and maintained by a convocation of state legislators which meets biennially, delegations which can be repealed if necessary. Vest this body with the sole franchise to propose constitutional amendments and with the power to strip court decisions of their status as binding precedent and inhibit their publication and citation.

    2. A constitutional amendment on public finance which would have among it provisions a requirement that disbursements of federal aid to states and localities be limited to

    a. disaster relief drawn from an indemnity fund.
    b. unrestricted grants (to the states) distributed according to a formula taking into account population and per capita income.

  19. Actually, the idea of having a threshold you have to cross after say, three House or two senate elections makes sense. It keeps them moving on.

    The problem, is it has become a Cursus Honorum.

  20. Amending the Constitution, which nearly every idea suggested requires, takes 2/3 of BOTH House and Senate AND ratification by 38 states.

    So the problem is we can’t beat incumbents with even a plurality in elections, but we expect them to overwhelmingly endorse Amendments to do it to themselves? Right.

    Oh, call a Convention instead? Okay, that means 34 state legislatures to call it, and then when it convenes – oh, wait just a minute now! How are delegates selected? Who gets how many? How many years will this be tied up in court arguing before you ever reach the end of litigation?

    You guys really need to stop buying those ACME DIY blueprint kits.

  22. Increasing the number of representatives as the First Congress intended (see thirty-thousand.org) would help, because smaller districts mean fewer voters which makes elections harder to game and makes TV ads no longer cost-effective. It also means that challengers have fewer voters they need to reach to unseat incumbents.

    Reducing gerrymandering would also help; my anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment reads as follows:

    “No Congressional District shall be drawn that does not cover at least half of its State’s land area inside of east-west lines through the northernmost and southernmost points of the District, and north-south lines through the easternmost and westernmost points of the District.”

  23. Ever hear the name Daniel Webster? He was a very corrupt man who was quite open about his corruption. He actually wrote one man about the renewal of his graft. Having pensions not only did not reduce corruption, it’s actually increased it and drove a lot of it into hiding.

  24. I realize this was before the world got so litigious, but most states managed to hold conventions in 1933 to consider the 21st amendment.

  25. The Senate floor leaders have a net worth of $16.7 million between them. H. Reid has been a public official full stop for all but nine years since completing his schooling (and come on, law practice in the small city Las Vegas was forty years ago is not that lucrative). M. McConnell has been a public official without interruption since 1967.

    These are the assets which show up on their disclosure forms.

    —

    Walter Mondale left the vice presidency with a net worth of $15,000 in 1981. Given the change in nominal income per capita since then, that would be a sum as hard to come by as $60,000 today. Mondale cleared over $500,000 (as hard to come by as $1.7 million today) over the succeeding two years or so, mostly working as a lobbyist for the firm Winston & Strawn. This was considered scandalous by some people, among them Michael Kinsley, then editor of The New Republic. Rahm Emmanuel, whose only private sector employment up to age 40 was working at Arby’s, was paid an eight figure sum by Wasserstein, Perella for ‘investment banking services’. One of the few who have written about this is William Dyer, whose writing is strictly avocational.

    The press in dealing with these characters has been like the Securities and Exchange Commission dealing with Bernard Madoff. You hand it to them on a plate and they do nothing. We’ve gotten like Venezuela in the twenty years or so antedating Hugo Chavez. As one diplomat put it in 1998: “here, scandals start at $50 million and up”.

  26. Start by repealing the 17th amendment so Senators aren’t running around collecting campaign contributions all year long — Rather, they’d be re-elected by the State Legislature where they supposedly live. Chalk the 17th amendment up as another failed Progressive idea from a century ago, just like Prohibition and the income tax.

    It would also help to pass a private sector equality act, that would prohibit politicians, burrocrats, and public union from having defined benefit pension plans and health benefits and other benefits that are not in line with those of the average private sector worker — they need to have market sensitive defined contribution plans like most private sector folks.

    As for term limits, One and Done. It would be more effective to say you shouldn’t be able to run for office while holding a (taxpayer funded) job or office — too easy to buy votes and power with other people’s money. One and done, then back to the main street private sector until the next election cycle… It’s a lot harder to fund raise when you aren’t in office handing out goodies for this or that crony deal.

  28. We have cornhusker kickbacks and the Louisiana Purchase now. By making the senators accountable to the states instead of the Parties, we’ll return to representative republican democracy instead of parliamentary democracy. By enforcing the the Law, we’ll cut down on the looting of the Treasury by members of Congress.

  30. So we shouldn’t try? What you’re saying is BOHICA and we should love it. You’re simply a preening establishment idiot. May your chains rest lightly, although I imagine you’re well rewarded for your stupidity.

  31. Prohibition was not a Progressive idea. The Ladies Temperance Union was the force behind that.

    Also forbidding anyone to vote for a given ballot if you are taking any kind of income from that level of Government would put an end to a lot of the incestuous relationships we see with organizations like AFSCME and SEIU. Welfare recipients would be disenfranchised as well.

  32. Eliminate the current 4th branch of the government (the bureaucracy) and create a new 4th branch a house of repeal. The members of this house would have to run on how much legislation and how many regulations they repealed thus creating the incentive to do the right things for the wrong reasons (getting reelected).

  33. I was about to say. Everyone bellyaches about Congress, but it’s other people’s Congressmen/Representatives that are “the problem”, never theirs.

  34. Where I live, I have the first congressman I have EVAH been happy with — but I was already living here when he got elected, and I’ve seen the subtle signs of creeping assimilation.

    For the good of the country, and my district, and my congressman’s soul, I remain wholeheartedly in favor of simple, straightforward term limits.

  35. The other problem is unequal enforcement of the laws already in place. The Neo Aristocracy is well-connected, which is why they get away with the blatantly illegal.

  36. Yeah, I mentioned adding a higher moving bar to the victory side in Discussion #3. Term limits remind me of bicameralism and electors: not optimal, just better than anything else.

    While, as Levin points out, time-in-office = power, and term limits definitely helps there, the real solution is somehow finding a way to remove the advantages of incumbency. Or at least limit them.

    Levin proposes 12 years. I’d like to find a way to let the very best have two terms in the House followed by two in the Senate, and then definitely go home.

    Another thing that might help is making it so no member of congress may head a committee for more than one Session. You’d get your one shot as chair throughout the entire Session, then you may never sit for it again.

    I just thought of that one this morning. If all we did was that one thing, it might do a lot toward limiting the influence peddling power that grows with time in office.

  39. You seem to think this has never been done before.

    We know how it works, and we’ll do it just as it has been done several times. It’s not complicated at all.

  40. Conyers, Carl Levin, his brother Sander Levin, and John Dingell (who won his Father’s seat, keeping it in the family for nearly a hundred years) amass nearly 150 years of congress seat-holding from within one small part of Michigan.

    Term limits would be worth it just to break up such dynasties.

  41. This is a terrific idea. It answers both sides of the issue.
    —
    I had my own idea for a reform. The order of primary elections (per state) should be set by unemployment rate and deficit. Whichever state is picking their government correctly gets the first say for the national presidential nominee. The state doing the worst gets the last say. This makes a lot more sense to me than what we’re doing now, where a lot of voters in conservative success stories basically don’t have a vote until the primary is decided or all but.

Comments are closed.