npr:How would Donald Trump “drain the swamp” in Washington as he puts it? Two words: term limits.At

npr:How would Donald Trump “drain the swamp” in Washington as he puts it? Two words: term limits.At a rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., Tuesday, Trump said if elected in November he will “push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.”Trump did not elaborate on how many terms lawmakers could serve. The idea of capping how long lawmakers can spend in Washington is popular with many in the GOP and has been proposed before, most notably as part of the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in 1994. The measure was taken up by the GOP-led House after that election but didn’t come close to winning the necessary 2/3 majority to send it to the Senate.That proposal would have limited House members to two two-year terms and senators to two six-year terms. Several states have successfully enacted term limits for their legislatures.Trump Proposes Term Limits For CongressPhoto: Theo Stroomer/Getty ImagesThis is actually a really bad idea. I don’t want to get into the weeds on it with a huge-big explanation, but consider that legislating, like anything, is a skill that takes time to learn. If legislators don’t have the time to learn their craft, then the folks who’ll end up doing all the legislating(and being mentors to new legislators because they’re the only ones around who know how to do the job) will be the lobbyists who can stay there as long as they like. As it stands this is already a bit of a problem; career Congressional staffers and lobbyists write most of our national bills, and a HUGE problem with new Congresscritters, predominantly “Tea Partiers” recently, has been their refusal to read bills, and complete ignorance of how to write, or even understand, them.In a very real sense, then, the wealthy Interests behind the lobbyist industry have weaponized “Kick the Bums Out”ism like this to undermine legislative competence, and increase the structural importance of their hired agents(the Lobbyists). And as usual, the Republican party has actively participated in this assault on good governance: ALEC promulgates ready-made lobbyist-produced bills to every Republican office-holder in the US and the Republican party pushes these bills as a matter of principle, freeing Republican legislators of ever having to even think about the things they vote for. Legislative term-limits, by guaranteeing a batch of naive newbies every 2-4 terms, would only make this situation even worse.Another thing about this is that it plays into the aspects of USian Governance that are already dysfunctional. During President Barack Obama’s time in office much of the necessary but mundane business of government was left undone due to Republican sandbagging. The US Government is designed to work slowly, and to be easily interruptible so that all objections to a law must be rigorously considered and negotiated for it to have a chance of passing, and it’s easy to exploit this design as a vulnerability to just shut down legislating as a cynical tactic. This makes it easy to run out the clock; to simply stall a bill you don’t like until a yearly Session is over, forcing its proponents to write and present it again in a new Session. Dixiecrats did it to fight against Black civil rights after the Civil War, and Republicans have used it today to thwart progressive policies. Legislative Term Limits would put a hard date on how much time any one legislator has to push their agenda through. In other words, they’d tell you just how long you have to stall a bill before it goes away forever. So with term-limits we’d see even more sandbagging than we already do. -- source link

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