Fourteen state legislatures have passed a resolution asking for something Congress could, in theory, hand them for free: term limits on its own members. They aren’t asking Congress to pass a law. They’re applying for an Article V convention, the slower path to a constitutional amendment, because the faster path doesn’t exist. Twenty more states have to sign on before that convention can even be called. It would be far easier if Congress could just pass a statute capping House and Senate service the way the 22nd Amendment caps the presidency. It can’t. Not won’t. Can’t.
I’ve made the policy case for term limits before. This is the harder argument nobody makes: Congress lacks the constitutional tool to do this to itself, regardless of the votes. Two joint resolutions sit in the current Congress proposing a term-limits amendment the ordinary way, a two-thirds vote in both chambers. They will die there, the way every version has died for three decades, because no supermajority of incumbents has ever voted itself out of office. The 14 states already understand this. That’s why they skipped the vote Congress will never take.
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Here’s what doesn’t get discussed enough. Even with the votes, Congress still couldn’t do this by statute. The Constitution fixes the qualifications for federal office in exactly two places. Article I, Section 2 sets the House bar at 25 years old, seven years a citizen, an inhabitant of the state. Article I, Section 3 sets the Senate bar at 30, nine, and the same residency rule. That’s the whole list. Nothing about tenure, and nothing left open for Congress to add later.
The Supreme Court settled what that list means — twice. In Powell v. McCormack (1969), the House voted to exclude Adam Clayton Powell Jr. over alleged financial misconduct, even though he met every qualification the Constitution names. The court, 7-1, held the House had no authority to add a qualification of its own. The list is exclusive.
Then, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995), the court applied the same rule to the states. Twenty-three states had passed congressional term limits in the early 1990s. The court struck all of it down, 5-4, holding that the qualifications clauses were fixed by the framers to stay uniform and national, immune from alteration short of the amendment process. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence went further: the power to add a qualification for federal office was never a reserved state power to begin with. Nobody held it, except through Article V.
Run that forward, and it doesn’t stop at the state line. If a sovereign state, backed by its full 10th Amendment powers, can’t add one word to these qualifications, an ordinary act of Congress certainly can’t either. Congress’s authority is enumerated, not reserved, so it has less room here than the states Thornton already told no. A term-limits statute would be Congress amending the qualifications clauses by simple majority, the exact move Powell and Thornton both foreclosed.
I’ve spent 30 years reviewing fund documents, and the closest analogy is a general partner voting alone to rewrite its own mandate and extend its own control past the agreed term. That amendment needs the counterparties who actually hold the power. The Constitution’s counterparties are the states and the ratifying public, and Article V is the only clause that lets them consent.
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The 22nd Amendment got this right because it had no other route. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms broke a tradition, not a law, since nothing in the original text capped the presidency. Congress passed the amendment in 1947, and the states ratified it by 1951. That’s the only door the Constitution has installed for this kind of change, and it’s the same door standing open for Congress’s own tenure. Nobody has walked through it, because the people who would have to propose it are the people it would limit.
Which is why the 14-state count matters more than the two resolutions already dead in this Congress. The convention route doesn’t ask Congress’s permission. It routes around the self-interest problem that has killed every term-limits bill for 30 years, through the only mechanism the qualifications clauses actually permit. Twenty more states get it over the line. Until then, every argument that Congress could simply pass a law skips past a court that has already answered this twice: the list is fixed, and only the states and the public, acting through Article V, can change it.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
