Not So Fast on Term Limits

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host 

The idea of term limits for Congressional members has been a popular topic of late, and one that President Donald Trump touched on during the presidential campaign season of 2016.  In the Articles of Confederation the Founding Fathers put in place term limits, limiting representatives to three one-year terms in any six-year period.

When it came time to write the U.S. Constitution a decade later, however, the framers decided to leave term limits out of the American System.  They had once agreed with them, and tried them, but found that term limits did not curb corruption as they had hoped, and instead limited good men who could do great things if they only had the time.  Term limits also made the citizens less interested in being informed because the bad ones would be gone in a few terms, anyway.

James Madison wrote that term limits might actually lead to government dysfunction. He wrote that frequent elections were a better check on power than forcing legislators out of office by law.

In other words, the best term limits are those applied by the voters who, if informed and virtuous, will vote out the problematic representatives, and retain those who are beneficial and abide by the U.S. Constitution.

The better check against corruption in government, argued the anti-term limits forces in the Constitutional Convention (according to Madison’s Notes), are regular elections by the people.  And, as seen under the Articles of Confederation, restrictions of the terms of legislators created their own problems.

In Federalist Paper #53 James Madison explained that the higher proportion of new representatives swept into office due to term limits could lead to poor decisions and corruption from a wave of inexperienced legislators.

He wrote, the “greater the proportion of new members, and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt will they be to fall into the snares that may be laid for them.”