Do term limits help or hinder? After all, if we had term limits then the average congressman would need to go off and find a new job once he's finished in congress. And there's no shortage of folks (whether companies, unions, NGOs, foreign governments, or any ol' well-funded group you like) who'd just love to give cushy well-paid jobs to former congressmen who had been suitably sympathetic to their interests during their time in congress.
More churn in Congress would decrease the value of any one congressperson to private industry, and would also reduce the tendency of members of Congress to amass large numbers of markers that they call in later.
It would also change the entire dynamic of Congress, to be less of a club and more of a transitional job, people coming from some other job -- some of them perhaps even hoping to do the right thing regardless of political fallout -- and then disappearing from the public stage and moving on to another stage their lives, rather than turning elected service into their lives.
A seminal paper on this subject from 1968, The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives, by Nelson Polsby:
http://crespin.myweb.uga.edu/polsby.pdf
1968 was a long time ago. Term limits have been implemented all over the place. In reality, it means that politicians stop being responsible for their actions, and you get white elephant projects and unusually brazen bribery.
Why would they do anything else? I imagine the pay and perks are great.
Besides, after a career in Congress reading bills that were written by lobbyists, a lot of the new lobbyists are probably looking forward to get a chance to actually write some bills.
Maybe what really needs to be done is that the politicians need to be told that we don't need any more laws (except for the law that says no more laws.)
Then they'll have nothing to do and therefore no incentive to be elected.
I imagine ex-bureaucrats are useful to hire because of all the connections they made while in office. If there are term limits and the churn rate is high, that doesn't leave much time to build those connections while in office, or to keep them after they've left.
There's already a revolving door between K-street and Congress, so hugh3's point is valid. Yours is too, I guess.
I think some setup that turns politician into a job that you do in between real jobs instead of a career in itself would be ideal, I just don't have any ideas that would necessarily work. Term limits do work with Presidents and seem to help with Mayors in a lot of cities (if you think city machines are bad now, non-term-limited mayors would make them worse).
Well, there are only so many positions that corps paying for government officials can give away. If there were terms limits and a high churn rate, eventually the market would be saturated. They can't hired all the Senators that voted for their bills.
Hey, I really want to be on your side in this argument, but that number of positions is certainly greater than 535, right? More of those than there are elected federal positions.
The 535 number only counts one 'round' of Congress-critters. Let's assume the max term is 2 years, and all Congress-critters are in lock-step on their terms. So 535 leave Capital Hill, and enter industry and a new wave of 535 enter Congress. In 2 years, when it's time for them to leave (and enter industry), industry now has a workforce of 1070 ex-Congress-people (assuming that all of them enter industry). That number will continue to grow unless the industry positions after leaving office are capped (and the greater the cap, the greater the market saturation on these industry positions are). If that's the case, then those industry positions are consequentially less valuable.
I think term limits are probably ineffective, if only because so many staff stick around even as the names on the offices change, and they hold so much of the power.
Massive agreement. "Yes, Minister" and the follow up "Yes, Prime Minister", despite being just over 30 years old now are brilliant satires of politicians and the civil service.
Rather than instituting term limits, we could try what the founders set up, and arrange for senators to be representatives of state legislatures, not state populations. Same problem exists, but I'd imagine its harder to buy the backing of a few hundred politicians than one.
