Speaking only for myself and not my colleagues at IWF, where I feel certain we could have a debate on this issue, I've always opposed term limits.
If the U.S. had adopted terms limits early in our history, we would never have had the long careers of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, or any number of other congressional greats. And I've always maintained that we do have term limits: only we call them elections.
Nevertheless, our current political class, which is decidedly divorced from people who don't live in Washington, may be Exhibit A in favor of term limits. John Fund has a terrific piece in National Review over the resurgence of interest in term limits:
The gulf between incumbent officeholders and the American people is never bigger than on the issue of term limits. A Gallup survey from January 2013 found that 75 percent of Americans — including huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents — support term limits on Congress. In the poll, young people (under 30) and older Americans (over 65) both gave the concept 74 percent approval.
Blacks favored it even more than did whites, and women more than men. Support is greater now than it was at the height of the term-limits movement in the 1990s. Back then, Martin Plissner, the late political director for CBS News, told me he had “never seen an issue on which there [was] so little demographic variation.”
While Donald Trump has dodged questions on term limits, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson include term limits as part of their platforms. "A decade is about as much as you can do in [the] exact same position before you start to become complacent," Scott Walker has said. "It’s even more true in government. . . . People start looking over their shoulders instead of looking ahead.”
Florida has term limits:
Jeb Bush said last month that term limits in his native Florida led to a “significantly higher quality” of legislature, as more young people and women were elected and brought with them energy to tackle the status quo. One of them was Marco Rubio, a former speaker of Florida’s House who is now a U.S. senator from Florida and an enthusiastic backer of term limits. His own career is an advertisement for them.
As Josh Goodman of Governing magazine wrote in 2010: Rubio would not have been speaker of the house in 2007 [at age 35] if it weren’t for term limits. He might not have been a state legislator at all. In Florida, House members only can serve eight years before they have to leave office. Without that rule, it’s possible that the South Florida delegation would have been filled with politically untouchable 25-year veterans. A young politician like Rubio, who was elected to the legislature before he turned 30, might not have had a chance.
Occasionally, we would lose a great to term limits. But, in all honesty, how many greats serve in Congress just now?