Civic Failure and Its Threat to Democracy by Rackaway Chapman;

Author:Rackaway, Chapman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 7

The Dream and the Nightmare of Term Limits

Career Politicians

Sixty years is, quite literally for some, a lifetime. Spanning roughly three generations, most individuals would not think of holding any job for that long, let alone one as stressful as an elected official. Sixty years ago, for instance, schools had been racially integrated for just a few years. The United States was almost a decade away from successfully passing substantive civil rights legislation. The Korean War was fading from memory and formal military action in Vietnam was nearly a decade away. Over the course of sixty years the people of Michigan’s 12th District saw all of those changes, and just one Congressman: John Dingell.

John Dingell Jr. spent a lifetime (for many) in Congress, from 1955 until his retirement in January of 2015. Dingell served in World War II, returned stateside, and ran for Congress to succeed his father John Sr., who retired that year. Dingell himself was succeeded by his wife Debbie, which means a member of the Dingell family has been the only representative from the Michigan 12th District dating back to 1933. Thinking of the length of John Dingell Jr.’s extraordinary time in Congress, technically at fifty-nine years and twenty-one days, asks whether members of Congress should be allowed to run for the twenty-nine campaigns that Dingell contested.

Dingell is not the only member of Congress with an extraordinarily long tenure. Seven members of Congress, one still serving actively in 2015, have served in Congress for more than fifty years. All of them have served in the last hundred years. In fact, of the fifty longest-serving members of Congress, not a single one was elected before 1900. The 20th century became the century of political careerism.

Prior to Dingell, Jamie Whitten represented Mississippi for over fifty-three years. Robert Byrd combined House and Senate service to Virginia for a tenure of fifty-seven years. More than a hundred members of the House and Senate served for over thirty-six years, or the equivalent of two generations. Long tenures are problematic in a representative democracy. While a candidate may do a fine job and represent their district or state well, can one person stay in touch with their constituency through two generations of change and more? Even if we stipulate that one can, should people stay in office that long in a republican democracy? People may have the same spouse or insurance agent for fifty years, but in a job that requires being in touch with a large group of people and aggregating their interests into public policy decisions, long tenures tend to be associated with the opposite—distance between elected officials and constituents.

Does a long tenure equate to a lack of accountability, the cornerstone of republican elections? The question drove a movement in the 1990s to establish limits on the number of terms an elected representative can serve, both at the federal and state levels. Supporters of term limits claimed that the career politician undermined citizen governance, and if the voters themselves could or

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