By Chris Powell
Nobody can blame Themis Klarides for liking the idea of term limits. She is the Republican state convention’s choice to challenge U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who has been in elective office for 37 years and at age 76 is seeking a third six-year term in the Senate, at the end of which he would be 82.
So last week Klarides, the former leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, pledged that if elected to the Senate she will support a constitutional amendment limiting U.S. House members to three two-year terms and U.S. Senate members to two six-year terms. The amendment would not prohibit merely that number of [ITALICS] consecutive [END ITALICS] terms; its term limits would be [ITALICS] lifetime. [END ITALICS]
There is some irony here.
Polls show strong support for term limits in principle, but practice is otherwise, since while Americans hate Congress in principle, in practice they usually love their own members of Congress, with incumbents being re-elected to the House about 95% of the time and to the Senate about 85%.
Klarides herself served 11 terms, 22 years, in the state House before retiring last year — not quite Blumenthal-like longevity but long enough that a sincere belief in rotation in office might have caused her to look for other work at least a decade ago.
The problem that term limits mean to address is the same problem term limits would worsen — a lack of democracy.
Yes, elections often are not as competitive as they should be. But incumbency, the favors it can bestow, and the advantages it confers in campaign fundraising aren’t the only reasons.
Incumbency probably is not as decisive as districting for political advantage — gerrymandering. States that want political impartiality rather than favoritism in districting can assign the task to a nonpartisan agency, or at least a bipartisan one as Connecticut does.
The campaign fundraising advantages of incumbents could be reduced by requiring holders of federal television and radio broadcasting licenses to provide much free advertising time to federal candidates. That’s where most federal campaign money is spent. (Such a system of government financing of campaign ads could restrict them to a candidate’s delivering his message himself, without the flashy graphics and sinister sound effects.)
There is wisdom in the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, limiting the president to two terms, because the presidency holds enormous executive powers and longer tenure in office might facilitate tyranny. But congressional office is without executive power and every member of Congress shares legislative power with 534 others. There is little danger of tyranny in letting any member of Congress serve indefinitely, but prohibiting people from re-electing a legislator contradicts democracy.
Rotation in office can be achieved far short of doing that. Even now if voters want to replace an elected official they can figure out how to do it, just as Klarides’ own constituents easily could have replaced her long ago but didn’t. Does she now think they were wrong?
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CONNECTICUT LAGS AGAIN: Maybe Connecticut’s unfavorable business climate isn’t big news anymore, but this month CNBC did another survey anyway and ranked the state 39th out of 50 for attractiveness to business. Despite Governor Lamont’s recent national appeal to businesses to relocate to Connecticut so their employees can enjoy the state’s liberal abortion law, nearly all the states with the most restrictive abortion laws ranked higher than Connecticut in the survey.
The most notoriously anti-abortion state, Texas, was fifth. It’s easy to see why the governor’s wife, an investment banker, recently was pursuing business opportunities in Tennessee, since that state ranked sixth, just behind Texas. Also running far ahead of Connecticut were supposedly benighted Utah (8), North Dakota (13), Idaho (20), South Dakota (22), Wisconsin (23), Kentucky (26), and Wyoming (32).
These states may be culturally backward, since, unlike Connecticut, they lack “drag queen story hours” in their libraries and “pizza sex” lessons and “social-emotional learning” in their schools. But their growing prosperity might teach Connecticut more about business than Connecticut might teach them about abortion. At least they seem to know what pays the freight and that it’s not abortion or other politically correct stuff.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 