It’s been seven years since the Supreme Court narrowly decided
to prohibit mandatory congressional term limits. Yet the term
limits era on Capitol Hill continues apace. No, there hasn’t
been a silent constitutional coup to appease the populists, who
in 1994 appeared poised to topple a disengaged political
establishment. Rather, the good news for supporters of
representative democracy and limited government is that since
1994 several dozen new faces have entered the halls of Congress
promising to voluntarily leave office after three terms in the
House of Representatives. Collectively, they are the unheralded
self-limiters, who came to Washington not for a government
career but to contribute to national policymaking before happily
returning to their former lives and (usually private sector)
jobs. Those who wrote our Constitution debated the idea of
mandatory congressional term limits but, confident that
sufficient safeguards (such as voluntary retirements) were in
place to forestall careerism, they chose not to