Old-fashioned Term Limits

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | June 14, 2025

According to Pew Research, Ballotpedia, and pretty much all other public opinion research companies, the approval rating for Congress hovers right around 30 percent. So seven out of 10 adult Americans think Congress is doing a crummy job of which they disapprove. One suspects if more people were paying closer attention, the approval ratings would plummet even further.

The public would be right; Congress has become a dysfunctional body of warring incompetents incapable of even the most obvious bits of common sense.

For example, they are now in the process of trying to pass a massive budget bill on which the House voted the day after the thing was printed. The bill, by the way, is 1,038 pages long and was read in its entirety by no member of the House—but vote on it they did. And what a bill it is.

The bill continues and, in some cases actually increases tax breaks for the country’s top income earners while, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), reducing the take-home pay of those making less than $51K annually by four percent over the next decade.

It pays for these tax breaks by reducing Medicaid payments by $880 billion, potentially eliminating healthcare for as many as 10 million Americans due to new Medicaid requirements. As a bonus, it increases the red tape to qualify for the Affordable Care Act, so those losing Medicaid will find it difficult to even apply for ACA coverage. If they do, the bill eliminates ACA subsidies—so no Medicaid and maybe no affordable ACA.

The bill also eliminates taxes on gun silencers, ends tax breaks for electric vehicles and other clean energy efforts, increases and makes permanent tax-free inheritance of up to $30 million, and, oddly, takes away the right of states to regulate artificial intelligence.

That’s just a tiny sample of this monstrosity the CBO says will add $4.4 trillion to the national debt. That's $4,400,000,000,000.

Two Republicans voted against the bill, one voted “Present,” and two were absent, but the rest of House Republicans voted for something they had not read because Donald Trump told them to. They will now get to explain themselves to constituents at rowdy town hall meetings. Democrats voted in lockstep against, their nearly impotent opposition unable to stop much of anything these days.

Perhaps wiser heads will prevail in the Senate, where several Republicans have expressed opposition to both the potential Medicaid cuts, the environmental protection rollbacks, and a tax plan that will benefit few at the expense of many.

So what’s the solution to the problems with Congress? Some would suggest term limits, and that certainly has some appeal given what we are currently witnessing. Injecting fresher blood on a somewhat regular basis with the possibility of electing some actual adults willing to work together to achieve something positive has its fans. Alas, it is essentially impossible.

Our Constitution specifies the terms for members of the House and Senate but puts no limits on the length of service. Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia served for more than 50 years. Chuck Grassley from Iowa is 91 and serving his 45th year. The late Strom Thumrond from South Carolina served until he was 100. Eight current members of Congress have been there at least four decades and another dozen at least 35 years.

This seems a trifle excessive, but members of Congress can serve as long as they are alive and keep getting elected. It will take a Constitutional Amendment to establish term limits, and there’s a reason that has only happened 27 times in our history.

An amendment requires the approval of two-thirds of both the House and Senate, the very bodies that would be limited. Then 75 percent of state legislatures or state conventions must agree. As an alternative, two-thirds of the states could call for a Constitutional Convention, at which time amendments could be offered or the entire document rewritten, which we should probably avoid.

The old arguments against term limits that we’ve heard every time a state enacts them on their legislature—loss of institutional knowledge, loss of legislative continuity, etc.—have proven false everywhere. But term-limiting Congress is a practical and political impossibility.

We’re trapped with an incompetent but constitutionally protected Congress we don’t like. We’re already exercising one form of term limits at every election, and there is more turnover in Congress than we might imagine. According to Congress.gov, the current average tenure for House members is only 8.6 years and just 11.2 years for the Senate.

Unfortunately, too many of us now vote against our own best interest. Anyone actually representing us would oppose the big, horrible bill. If they didn’t, we should do our jobs as conscientious citizens and vote for someone else—anyone else—enacting term limits the old-fashioned way at the ballot box.