Sen. Jim DeMint lost a symbolically important vote last week during debate on the Stock Act banning insider trading by members of Congress and senior congressional aides. DeMint offered an amendment in the form of a “sense of the Senate” resolution backing a constitutional amendment limiting senators to two terms and representatives to three terms in Congress. As expected, DeMint’s amendment was defeated decisively, 75-24. A check of those voting for the amendment revealed they had an average of six years seniority, compared to 13 years for those who opposed the DeMint proposal. Probably nobody is surprised that career politicians oppose measures like term limits, even though the idea has been supported for decades by two-thirds of the American public.
After being left for dead in 1995, the term limits issue has been revived more recently, thanks to DeMint and the recent endorsement of Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney. “I would love to see term limits for congressmen and senators. We have one for the president. It’s a good idea,” Romney said. With congressional approval ratings in the low teens and a recent Fox News survey finding huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents favoring term limits, long-serving senators and representatives in both parties might want to think twice about their lack of enthusiasm for this idea.
Meanwhile, it’s instructive to review how term limits died in the early months of the Congress that passed the Contract with America under then-Speaker Newt Gingrich. How it happened illustrates the hard reality that career Republican politicians can be just as venal and self-serving as career Democratic politicians. As Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who was elected to the House in 1994, said in his 2003 book, “Breach of Trust”: “Of all the reforms the freshmen wanted to bring to Washington, I believed setting term limits was by far the most important. It was the soul of the Contract with America.”
Gingrich posed as a proponent of term limits during the 1994 congressional campaign, even though just three years earlier he had described it as “a terrible idea.” But by 1994, 23 states had approved term limits for their officials and, as Coburn noted, it had become identified nationally with Gingrich’s Contract with America. Gingrich was even known in some quarters as “the godfather of the term limits movement.”
Once Gingrich became speaker in 1995, however, he began pushing a behind-the-scenes proposal to allow representatives to serve 12 terms instead of the three favored by the public. He also stood by as other senior House Republicans introduced variations on the number of terms allowed. Coburn described the result: “In the end, leadership [i.e. Gingrich] rigged the vote to make sure that every Republican could go on record voting for term limits of some kind while ensuring that no measure received a majority of votes. The freshmen were outraged by their deceptive tactics.”
Not long ago, a board member of the U.S. Term Limits advocacy group asked Gingrich about his view on the issue and was told “we tried that before and it didn’t work.” It didn’t work because the politicians wouldn’t let it work.
