Are Term Limits Bad?

By Dave

Ezra Klein thinks so:

The product of this verges on the comical. As a California budget-watcher pointed out to me, when you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room with the leadership of the Senate and Assembly, Schwarzenegger has the most budget and legislative experience in the room. A guy who was starring in Terminator films as recently as 2003 is now the most seasoned elected official during one of the worst crises California has ever had. Term limits are one of those ideas that sound good in theory but are madness in practice. You wouldn't want to go to a hospital filled with medical residents or stock a sports team with an ever-changing cast of rookies. Legislating is hard. We need to give people time to learn how to do it.

In the mind of the public, term limits are a way to flush the political system. But Ezra's right, it takes time to learn the ins-and-outs. Another unintended consequence of term limits is that they give more power to career lobbyists. This happens in a couple of ways.

First, term limits transfer institutional memory away from elected people and to the lobbyists. While your representative will only keep their job for a few short years, a career lobbyist will have been there for a long time. If they're good at their job, they will have made in-roads with the staffers and behind-the-scenes players, and chances are they will be pretty well liked and generally respected. More importantly, they will know the issues inside-and-out in way a newbie politician couldn't. When their issue comes up, that lobbyist will have much more influence than if they were dealing with a seasoned politician.

Second, term limits change the incentives for an elected official. If elected life is no longer a potential career, the incentive is to leverage your elected years into another job. This shouldn't be a surprise. Everyone does this with their job. Politicians do this by trying to turn one elected office into a higher one. But if you're a Senator, who has no chance of being President, and term limits are going to push you out of office, where is there to go? Well, the incentive will be to leverage your influence into a high paid job when you are done. This is another win for lobbyists who can promise these jobs in return for legislative favors. If you think this a problem now, wait until term limits are instituted.

Lobbyists aren't evil people, even though we tend to vilify them. That aside, legislative power cannot and should not rest with them. It should be with our elected officials. The danger is the more we chip away the more we expose the system to unintended consequences which may actually produce worse results.