Essay: The Failure of Term Limits - 3.9.10

A new study on the effects of term finds that they’ve been a disaster for the state. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains…

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There’s plenty of historical evidence that the vast majority of Americans have firmly believed two things since the Declaration of Independence was signed. First of all, we have the greatest country and the greatest people in the world.

If you challenge that statement in a bar in Flint some night, you are apt to have a serious fight on your hands. However, we also firmly believe that most of our politicians and elected officials are crooks, scoundrels, incompetent or simply wrongheaded.

More than a century ago, Mark Twain said, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Today, we might substitute “crook” for “idiot.”

As for state officials, surveys show the voters hold them in even lower regard. Well, eighteen years ago, after numerous scandals and frustrations with government, Michigan voters attempted to do something about this. They went to the polls, and enacted one of the most extreme term limit laws in the nation. Here’s how it works: Anyone elected to the state house of representatives can serve a maximum of three two-year terms. Anyone elected to the state senate can be there for no more than two four-year terms.

Statewide office holders - governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state - can serve two four-year terms, and then that‘s it. For life. The idea was to get a better legislature, more representative of the citizens.

The new citizen lawmakers would supposedly be freer from influence by lobbyists, and less indebted to special interests.

Term limits completely kicked in a dozen years ago, and it’s time to ask how they have done. Fortunately, a team of researchers at Wayne State University led by Dr. Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson have been studying their effects right from the start. They’ve just published a major article in Legislative Studies Quarterly, and their findings are perfectly clear: Term limits have been a terrible failure in every sense of the word. True, they’ve succeeded in getting new faces into the legislature, but otherwise have done us great damage.

The new article reveals that state lawmakers now spend far less time monitoring what state agencies do than they did before term limits, though everyone expected the opposite.

What’s more, the new legislators have turned out to be more dependent on lobbyists and special interests than in the “bad old days.” There’s a reason for this, Sarbaugh-Thompson concludes:

Today’s legislators don’t have enough time to learn their jobs. There are no veteran lawmakers to mentor them. As for monitoring state agencies, she said “research shows that many legislators elected after term limits don’t even realize this is part of their job.“

Sarbaugh-Thompson wrote a book a few years ago setting down her preliminary findings, but things have clearly gotten worse.

Anyone who covers the legislature knows that term limits are clearly responsible for the dysfunction that’s behind our perpetual state budget crisis today. Yet nobody seems to have the political courage to admit we made a mistake and need to get rid of them. The founding fathers, by the way, did give us the best system of term limits there is. If you don’t like what they do, vote ’em out.

That worked for two centuries. Let’s take a truly conservative approach, and get back to that, soon as we can.

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[Account Deleted]

Lessenberry argues that term limited representatives don't have the experience needed to be effective- yet I'll bet that didn't stop him from voting for first time President Obama and first-time Governor Granholm. And I don't see him arguing for the elimination of the presidential term limit. The truth of the matter is that expertise rests in the staffs, and not the elected officials. The British understand this, and have separated governing into elected officials, who only make policy, and a professional civil service who carry it out.