Send that congressman home - term limitation - column

National Review, Nov 19, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Colorado and California, as we know, will ask the voters whether their representatives, state and congressional, should be limited in their terms in office, a question the voters in Oklahoma have already answered-in the affirmative. There is little doubt that the term-limitation idea is popular; it is a way of expressing a general disillusionment with Congress. To be sure, the direct way to discipline Congress is to vote out the representative who is there. But this is manifestly something the voters find it hard to do. They are, as is the case with pork barrels, against other people's congressmen; their own, they proceed to reelect. Time after time.

There is the constitutional question, of course. Do the voters have the authority to limit the terms of their congressmen? One school of thought says yes, and points to two federal-court decisions, one of them by the Supreme Court, upholding the right of a state to tell Mr. Jones that he can't run for the Senate unless he gives up his seat in the House. The prevailing opinion is that the state's right to limit an individual's candidacy to one office at a time does not vitiate the straight-arrow language of the Constitution that tells us (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1), "The times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations."

Whatever the constitutional point, advocates of reform believe that clear mandates in Colorado and California, added to Oklahoma's, would either force Congress to ratify such arrangements, or even bring on a constitutional amendment. The likelihood of the former, in the opinion of Terry Considine, a Republican state senator leading the drive for a term limit in Colorado, is small-like asking the chickens to vote for Colonel Sanders." That the House would vote for an amendment that would liquidate by rotation its own membership seems improbable, though of course the Senate, by skillful manipulation of pressures by the states, succeeded two generations ago in removing from the state legislatures the power to name senators, giving it to the people.

What should conservatives think about the proposal? Professor Charles Kesler of Claremont-McKenna, an influential young conservative theorist, opposes radical term limitation on interesting grounds. He asks first, How did the longevity of congressmen happen? Mr. Kesler finds most convincing the arguments advanced by Morris Fiorina in his book, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment. The reason congressmen just sit there decade after decade is that government has become so complicated, constituents need individual chaperonage through the bureaucratic thickets of Social Security, unemployment, Medicaid, veterans' benefits-and the individual congressman's huge staff provides this, and earns the reward for its boss. If the boss were to go, the staff would go and, reasons Mr. Kesler, the voters would then find themselves one more echelon removed from the people who exercise power.

That is a reasonable argument, though the argument for rotation has even greater weight, one would think. I have in mind this: that legislators who anticipated spending most of their productive lifetimes doing work under the law would be more susceptible to creating congenial, workable laws. Donald Rumsfeld, when he found himself head of a large drug company, confessed (to me) that he was ashamed, as he reflected on the years he had spent in public service, that he had not paid enough attention to the problems of the private sector. George McGovern, running an inn in Connecticut, also confessed (to me) the identical reservations-"I wish I had known a little more about the problems of the private sector."

After the Civil War, the duration of an individual congressman's tenure in office doubled, and since then it has doubled again, and now we are up against the 100 per cent return figure. As a conservative always drawn to the distinctions between the Senate and the House, which distinctions were emphasized by the Founders, I'd be drawn to limiting the terms in the House, and leaving the Senate (which is more volatile alone.