Are Term Limits a Good Idea?
EPISODE 4: A presidential historian, political scientist, and longtime DC columnist joined Governors Bredesen and Haslam live at George Washington’s Mount Vernon home outside of Washington, DC, to discuss term limits across branches of government.
The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, made official a precedent set by George Washington: that U.S. presidents should not be elected more than twice. While the Constitution outlines other qualifications for members of the U.S. House and Senate including age, citizenship, and residency, it does not impose term limits on members of Congress, and the judiciary consists almost entirely of lifetime appointments. Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and author, Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and Jerry Seib, former executive Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal, joined Governors Bredesen and Haslam live at George Washington’s Mount Vernon home outside of Washington, DC, to discuss term limits, weighing experience and seniority versus renewal and broader participation across branches of government.
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“The American people didn’t know how to elect a president”
Chervinsky, a presidential historian and author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, opened the conversation by recapping the history of how Washington came to his “absolutely monumental” decision to voluntarily give up the presidency. He was tired of being criticized, worried about his health because all the men in his family had died young, and genuinely ready to go home, Chervinsky said.
“More importantly, he understood that he could have stayed in office until he died, had he wanted to…He could have stayed, but he knew that the American people didn’t know how to elect a president,” she told the crowd at Mount Vernon.
“His two elections had been unanimous. There had never been a contest…there had never been a peaceful transfer of power. Certainly not in the United States, and there were very few in history books generally,” Chervinsky added. “And that process had to be learned. And he understood that it would go better if it happened while he was alive because he could be there as sort of a guiding force. He could be there to give his stamp of approval to that process. He could be there to keep things in check if it went badly. And so he was determined that election, that peaceful transfer of power, happen on intentional terms – not by accident.”
“The people who got the big things done were people who were around”
The group discussed the merits and tradeoffs of applying term limits in state legislatures, Congress, and the Judicial Branch, as well as the idea of age limits.
When it comes to members of Congress, one of the often-cited arguments against term limits is that people who are in office for longer periods of time build relationships and expertise that help them get things done in a matter that someone who is newly elected to office cannot. Seib, the longtime Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal, pointed to people like Howard Baker and Bob Dole as evidence in support of this argument. “The people who got the big things done were people who were around…I don’t think Bob Dole became a master legislator until he’d been in Congress for 20 years. He became a master legislator over time. Howard Baker is somebody I think I would also cite in that category.”
Chervinsky added a historical example, noting that John Quincy Adams “was able to take stances against slavery that no one else was able to take because he had been in office for a really long time and was so protected by that status.”
Drutman, who is opposed to term limits for members of Congress, did acknowledge a frequently cited argument in favor of term limits: the high proportion of legislators over the age of 60, which he noted is far above other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries. “There is a lot of wisdom in old age, but there is also a dearth of younger people who represent the future and are tremendously underrepresented,” he said. “So, how do you balance across generations? How do you bring new thinking in? I think there are other ways we can get to that than having term limits.”
“The US is a tremendous outlier”
Term limits are circumstantial, and would impact different branches of the government in different ways. The group was perhaps the most conflicted on the idea of applying term limits to the Judicial Branch.
“I have a very hard time with that one,” acknowledged Seib. “I think it’s probably a dangerous idea to term limit judges because you start creating limits on their impartiality, but I also see some cases where I think the public’s confidence in the courts might be enhanced if that were the case.”
Chervinsky added historical context, noting that in the early days of the Supreme Court, while people were living much shorter lives, they were also just generally less interested in spending long periods of time on the court and would often serve for 6-10 years before moving on to something else.
“That historic angle is important because the sort of power that we see with the court now, the expectations of the court now, were so beyond I think what the expectations were when the institution was initially crafted,” she said, noting that she feels more strongly in favor of term limits for the judiciary than she does on other branches.
Drutman pointed out that “the US is a tremendous outlier” on judicial appointments. “No other country in the world gives appointments to its judiciary that can only be ended by a flat line in a hospital,” he said. Drutman went out to detail a Supreme Court reform proposal he favors that would expand the size of the court to 27 or 51 justices, who would circle in and out. The benefit of that, he noted, was that “you wind up just having a lot less of this political gamesmanship, both in terms of appointments and also in terms of people bringing cases with particular judges in mind, knowing exactly what they think they are going to get. I think it would tremendously improve the role of the judiciary… I mean, thinking of things that the Framers never intended for, they never, they never intended for the courts to have this much power. Ever.”
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