Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in the 87%.
Then I went and read what happens in states that actually have term limits, and I had to revise. Not because term limits are some terrible policy — they’re not the worst thing on the reform menu, and a country where voters don’t really have a choice on the ballot is worse than one with term limits. But because the specific thing I thought they’d fix, they don’t fix. And some of the things I was angry about, they actually make worse.
So this is a “I was wrong, here’s how I got there” post. Walking through the homework.
Why the idea is appealing
Look at the Senate right now. Chuck Grassley is 92 and started his Senate term in 1981. Mitch McConnell entered in 1985. Pelosi’s been in the House since 1987. Feinstein finished her last term at 90 with obvious cognitive decline that her staff and party kept covering for until she died in office in 2023 — and the thing that bothers me isn’t that one case, it’s that the same dynamic keeps repeating. McConnell freezing up at a podium. Biden’s last year in office. There’s a structural problem with people staying in jobs that require sharp judgment past the point where they can do them, and we don’t have a mechanism for handling it.
Add to that the general feeling that the same people have been running things forever, that nothing ever changes, that nobody who walks in fresh ever really gets to shape anything — and a hard “twelve years and out” rule starts to sound like exactly what we need.
That was my position. Then I went to look at the data.
What actually happens when states try it
Nineteen states have legislative term limits. California has had them since 1990. Michigan since 1992. Arizona since 2000. We have thirty years of data to look at, and the academic literature on this is unusually consistent. The Citizens Research Council of Michigan published a study in 2018 titled “Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise,” which pretty much captures it. The Wayne State team that’s tracked Michigan for years found that lobbyist influence didn’t go down after term limits, it went up. The same pattern shows up in surveys of lobbyists themselves in term-limited states: power shifted away from the legislature toward governors, agency bureaucrats, and interest groups.
The reason is mechanical and obvious in retrospect. When you cycle a legislature every few years, the new arrivals don’t know how the budget works, don’t know how to write a bill that holds up in court, don’t know which agency does what, don’t have the relationships to build a coalition, and don’t have time to learn before they’re out. So who do they ask? The lobbyist who’s been working that issue for twenty years and has a pre-written bill in their briefcase. The career staffer who’s seen six legislators come through this committee. The party leadership that controls their next job.
The legislator gets termed out. The lobbyist stays. The lobbyist always stays. So if you wanted to reduce special-interest influence in government, you’ve actually just guaranteed the opposite.
And that’s before we even get to the part where term limits would force out the people who are actually doing the job well. Bernie Sanders is in his eighties and still sharp and still effective. A twelve-year rule kicks him out the same year it kicks out somebody half his age who’s just hitting their stride. The problem with Feinstein wasn’t time served. It was capacity. Those aren’t the same problem and a single blunt rule can’t solve both.
Who’s pushing it federally is also worth knowing. The largest term limits advocacy group is U.S. Term Limits, founded in 1992 and structured as a 501(c)(4) so it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. The funding that’s traceable comes heavily from the Koch network and conservative foundations. ALEC — the corporate lobbying group that ships pre-written model legislation to friendly state legislators — has term limits as a longtime priority. Heritage Foundation pushes them.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s rational self-interest dressed up in populist language. If you’re a corporate lobbyist, an endless supply of inexperienced legislators who don’t know what they don’t know is a great deal. The fact that the funded push aligns with the predictable outcome doesn’t have to be coordinated to be a problem.
The politicians who loudly support term limits are mostly doing it as a free vote. Ted Cruz has been a senator since 2013 and would be out under his own proposal — he’s also still running for re-election, with the dodge that “I’ll support them when they’re actually enacted.” Anybody can support a reform they know won’t pass.
The narrower thing that would actually help
For the gerontocracy problem specifically — which was honestly the part that pulled me toward term limits in the first place — there’s a more targeted tool. A maximum age for running for re-election, somewhere around 75. Or mandatory cognitive testing for sitting members past that line. We already have minimum age requirements for federal office; a ceiling on running for re-election is just the other end of the same idea, and it directly addresses what we’re actually worried about.
That’s the fix I’d want. Not a blunt time limit that boots Bernie Sanders the same day it boots someone with thirty good years left in them. Something aimed at capacity, because capacity is the actual problem.
I was wrong on this one. Took me a while to get there. The bumper-sticker version of the reform — twelve years and out, drain the swamp — sounded like it matched the size of my frustration. The boring version, which is that one of the problems is age-and-capacity and the other is dark money and uncompetitive districts and they each need their own specific tool, is less satisfying. It just happens to be true.
I’m probably wrong about other things I’m currently confident about too, and the only way I know to keep myself honest is to actually go check before I lock in.
That’s the whole post, really.
Even that's Odd 
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