This Election, Pushing for Term Limits in Congress Could Be What’s Needed to End Years of Dysfunction

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was elected in 2022 and like all U.S. Senators he will get a six-year term.

Fetterman ran a tight race against his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz, a TV celebrity doctor with marquee name recognition. Fetterman appealed to progressives in the state, self-identified as a progressive, and raised tons of money from out-of-state progressive individuals and organizations.

Fast forward to today, Fetterman disavows that he is a progressive, even mocking progressive groups. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

But Fetterman can do this because he will have six very long years to raise money from powerful special interest groups, carve out a new constituency, and leave his “progressive” past in the fog. 

To get an idea of the power of incumbency, 97% of incumbents get reelected in the U.S. Senate. In the last election cycle, 100% of Senate incumbents on the ballot got reelected.

The lesson here is that a six-year term is too long to hold senators accountable. And it’s painfully unjust when a senator like Fetterman ran on false pretenses then did a classic bait-and-switch with potentially no repercussions as his incumbency status most likely will entrench him in office by the time his next election comes around.

Term limits
This awesome political power that incumbents wield brings attention to a much-needed reform to our election process in Congress – that senators and representatives should have a mandatory restriction on how long they serve in the Senate and House.

Congress is where the most important decisions in our country are made, where conceivably unlimited amount of spending (only Congress can incur debt) occur, and where most of our tax dollars go. American citizens are better served with term limits to prevent any one elected individual from amassing too much power over years and often decades.

It’s known that elected officials at Congress spend an exorbitant amount of time raising money, cozying up with special interest groups, holding their own fundraising events and attending others. With term limits, politicians can spend less time politicking and more time on policy.

It’s highly unlikely that elected officials in Congress are adequately studying the issues and reading these thousand-page bills that come before them or spending adequate time working with their constituents. Term limits enable politicians to focus on the work rather than their next election.

Excessive power opens the door to corruption as we’ve recently seen with Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, are accused of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” in exchange for the senator’s influence, according to the newly unsealed federal indictment.

And the Menendez corruption charge is not isolated but one among many examples of corruption committed by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress spanning decades.

The argument against term limits saying that each election is actually a term limit is simply naive when big money and networks of big lobbyists are involved solidifying the incumbent advantage.

Without term limits as it is now, we see not just cases of individual corruption but arguably a system of corruption where powerful lobbyists and their anointed donor recipient promote the status quo.

Why else do you think hardly anything gets done and we see lobbyists donating to both sides of the political spectrum? Why else do you see big lobbyists repeatedly working against any attempts at passing term limits legislation?

Both Republican and Democrat legislators in the past have introduced term limits bills but each attempt has failed in part because it’s a hard sell to get lawmakers to limit their own power. The permanent political class in Washington is against term limits because they enjoy their permanency.

Listen to your constituents!
Enacting term limits has been a widely popular idea for decades. Remember in the 1990s when Republicans made term limits as one of its top platforms in their then Republican Contract with America. That’s arguably the last serious attempt at limiting congressional members’ terms.

It’s time that a new campaign on this issue is resurrected because Congress is dysfunctional and unresponsive to grassroots America both on the Democratic and Republican sides.

Republicans and Democrats rarely agree on issues but when it comes to term limits, there is vast support. An August 2023 Pew Research Center survey found a whopping 87% of Americans say they support congressional term limits. That’s truly an astounding percentage given today’s extreme partisan politics.

The bottom line is Congress is one of if not the most unpopular institutions and we need to shake up the permanency class in Congress, reboot, refresh that institution.

Implementing term limits is the kind of quake to change the status quo.

It’s an election year and voters should be asking their representatives in Congress if they would support term limits legislation.