Originally published by Divided We Fall.
By Congressman Ralph Norman (R-SC)
As we near the midterm elections, the debate on Congressional term limits resurfaces once again. Many bolster their arguments in favor of limits with the claim that incumbents hold power for too long. Those who argue against term limits claim that incumbents are the most qualified for the job and, having served before, are best able to push legislation through.
Let’s begin with the numbers. According to Ballotpedia, 93% of incumbents running for re-election in 2020 won their races. At the beginning of the 117th Congress, the average amount of prior service for each chamber was about 9 years for House members and 11 years for Senators. Although these averages don’t seem high, a large number of members serve for significantly longer.
The Affliction of Endless Incumbency
While many suggest that incumbents are the ones who should stay in government and not be regulated by term limits, the Constitution states otherwise. Our Founding Fathers never wanted career politicians to overrun the government. Instead, they established representation of the people and by the people. Despite this, the presence of career politicians has increased over time, with some Congress members serving as long as 59 years. An example of this from the 117th Congress was Representative Don Young, who had served a total of 49 years before ultimately passing away in office. In order to prevent members of either chamber from serving close to 50 years, there must be new legislation.
A hypothetical bill, one which would limit members of the House and the Senate to 12 years in service, would drastically change the environment on Capitol Hill. By limiting the tenures of career politicians, there would no longer be such huge gaps in experience between someone who was newly elected and someone who had been in office for an extended time. Members would have more opportunities to serve on committees that they were specifically interested in and have their opinions matter. It would be possible to see more mentoring between members, as legislators sought to maximize their shorter time in office by ensuring that important issues are continuously worked on by many more people.
As it currently stands, there are many members of Congress who hold the belief that they do not need to work with the other political party nor, indeed, anyone whose values differ from theirs. Neither side is to blame for the stark contrast in differing opinions. But rather than working towards understanding each other’s perspective, the unlimited terms that members can be reelected to allow legislators to dismiss opportunities for dialogue and instead, simply wait however long it takes until their side once again has the majority. Term limits would bring a steady flow of new members into Congress — members who would be more inclined to work with a wider range of people, rather than stick to their previous, familiar collaborators.
Term limits would allow more ideas to pass through Congress, as well. The foundation of American democracy is kept firm by representatives in government who truly represent the citizens in their districts. Recognizing their bounded tenures, legislators would shift their focus away from constant re-election and center it back upon being productive in office and carrying out the hopes of their constituents. This way, we would see a move towards bipartisanship within Congress. With more attention paid to the constituents, members would reach across the aisle more often, being less concerned with self-aggrandization and fawning media coverage.
The Physician Must Heal Itself
Robert Yates, the presumed author of Brutus 16, was concerned with the potential disconnect between members of Congress and their constituents back home. When we understand that a position in Congress is not only honorable but also potentially lucrative, the desire to remain in power for as long as possible can actually seem reasonable. That desire to forever be on center stage is precisely why Yates warned that members, “should not be so long in office as to be likely to forget the hand that formed them, or be insensible of their interests. Men long in office are very apt to feel themselves independent [and] to form and pursue interests separate from those who appointed them.”
Today, there is quite a lot of glamour around being a politician. The media loves to pick out the most divisive and well-known political figures to elevate in their headlines. However, Yates understood that the first and foremost role of a public figure needed to be that of a civil servant. Implementing term limits would reduce the capacity of celebrity-seeking demagogues to stir the pot and polarize the public’s opinions. Limits on time in office would assist in keeping politicians more grounded in their work, rather than in their image.
Congress must pass a bill allowing it to set term limits for its members. This can be done without needing to amend the Constitution. The spirit of democracy, the foundation of our great nation, is built upon the recognition by all public officials that their time in power is only momentary. The continuous, collaborative work of government requires the continual transition of power from one person to the next. Legislators must accept that the topics of discussion, issues, and ideals will continue to exist long after any single person’s term in office. America grows stronger when we realize that real progress cannot be made alone.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.