The Senate’s annual reading of George Washington’s “Farewell Address” on his birthday should be a heartwarming tradition [1]. Truthfully, however, I cannot understand how any modern Senator selected to recount its stirring 7,641 words can manage it with a straight face. There are many unpleasant ironies in that annual ceremony, because George’s address has the dysfunctions of the modern legislature pegged. It portends the factionalism, infighting, posturing, pandering, and breakdown of deliberation in our deliberative lawmaking body. Of the multitudes of civic virtues endorsed in the Address and abandoned by Congress, among the most tragic is Washington’s notion of an honorable period of public service followed by an honorable return to citizen life:
“... Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe, that while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it,” [2].
George Washington set the precedent for presidents to self-limit their terms in office—that tradition is now enshrined in our Constitution. In 2025, Congress—particularly the Senate—is suffocating under an aging mass of career politicians better suited to a retirement home than to the nation's paramount lawmaking chamber. Some of Congress’s perennial re-election candidates once represented the zeitgeist of their constituencies but now comfortably live out their years in office, perpetuated by name recognition and incumbency advantages long after “prudence invites them to quit the political scene.” Though the nature of the executive and legislative branches differ, I argue that members of both houses of Congress ought to follow Washington’s lead in retiring after a few productive and constituent-centered terms in office. Congress will not initiate its own term limits, and few legislators elected on such promises—including Utah’s very own Senator Mike Lee—posess the integrity to self-limit. Instead, the states must band together to propose an appropriate amendment to the Constitution.
The framers conceived of the House of Representatives as an authentically representative body. With many seats, short two-year terms, and direct election by the people, the Constitution optimized the House for responsiveness to popular will. The Senate’s fewer seats, by contrast, were to be filled by the vote of state legislatures for lengthier terms. This upper house supposedly upheld the continuity of government—a steady hand guiding policy through the turbulence of public opinion. In my view, this delicate balance of representation and political responsiveness versus continuity—both supposedly enshrined in our legislature—is the core of the debate over term limits.
The importance of continuity supersedes that of responsiveness in certain areas. The courts, for instance, are meant to be guardians of the law mooring the nation to its Constitution. Term limits imposed on them would turn their appointment into a predictable political exercise. A ‘politically responsive’ Supreme Court could, in short order, strike down enduring, important, but temporarily unpopular protections and rights.
In Congress, the strongest attacks on term limits are continuity arguments of a different kind. Effective legislating takes time to learn, and term limits cut good politicians’ influence short just as they are getting to know the job. Democracy’s critical feedback loop—accountability and incentive through elections—is broken when its administrators will not face the voters at the end of their brief service [3]. The incumbency advantage is a bulwark against the legislature’s careful ‘old guard’ being expelled (and replaced, for example, with loyalists to a power-hungry executive) at a moment of populist fervor. Even as 79% of Americans fume over our present legislature’s dysfunction and 87% favor term limits, these arguments are not easily dismissed [4].
I counter, however, that these philosophical rebuttals to term limits are, for the most part, illusions masking a dark economic reality. Big money in politics—a long-term problem made far worse by Citizens United v. FEC—and a legislature without term limits cannot coexist healthily. I offer compelling causal evidence that, once in office for an extended time, career politicians begin to acquire a ‘clientele’ of lobbyists, Super PACs, industry groups, business coalitions, donors, and special interest groups that perpetuate the incumbent in office. Deeply unsettling patterns of campaign cash flow derived from the incumbency advantage are the subject of a landmark paper by economists Alexander Fouirnaies of LSE and Andrew Hall of Harvard.
The paper begins by considering the causal effects of incumbency. In House races, far more funding—20% to 25% more—flows into the campaigns of incumbents than of challengers. Under the idealistic continuity framework of term limit opponents, the bump ought to be fueled by constituents rallying behind their representatives for a job well done in the previous term. Not so. Incumbents’ war chests see a 34% increase in out-of-state donations on average, and corporate jumps in contributions outpace those of labor by as much as 3.5 times. Access-oriented interest groups increase their donations by 41% to incumbents, making them responsible for 60% of the total financial incumbency advantage (71% in state races). Constituents, meanwhile, offer a comparatively modest 17% bump in campaign contributions. And is it true, as continuity advocates claim, that major campaign donors reward the experience, skill, and seniority of an incumbent? Not at all. In fact, those virtues produce absolutely no discernible effect in campaign finances [5]. I have no reservations in asserting that these gaps are more pronounced than ever today, given that reelection rates in both the House and the Senate are at historic highs in recent cycles [6].
Occam’s Razor compels me to conclude that incentives for legislative performance are primarily those offered by wealthy donors and corporate interests eager to secure compliance from incumbents in exchange for a fully-funded lifetime in office. Endless reelection is not so much an incubator of legislative wisdom as a petri dish for tainted money, distorted motives, and beholdenness to corporate and special interests. Continuity in Congress is, to an unsavory degree, preserved, protected, and defended by high bidders with hooks in the mouths of our Senators and Representatives. It makes very little sense to worry about legislators becoming effective at their jobs or being accountable to the voters for a job well done while their seats—regardless, on the whole, of who sits in them—are effectively investment opportunities for a wealthy and powerful clientele. I worry more when corporations and super PACs—which are not people and should not enjoy the same rights as citizens—pour unlimited cash into incumbent campaigns than about the possibility of our bought-off lawmakers losing their seats to populists.
I believe that gradually, term after term, an incumbent’s remunerative perks dismantle the scruples which might once have prevented conscience-defying donor-compliant votes. I am human; I am certain that much better men and women than me would succumb, at some point, to a rationalization such as, “Just cast this one vote, and Such-and-such Inc. will continue its patronage. I work hard for my state; surely it is worth this one compromise to win re-election and continue my good policymaking.” In this terribly probable line of reasoning—and in the fact of the clientele’s much larger role than the public in paying for elections—any remaining confidence that our modern Congress remains representative and responsive to the public will is ill-placed.
Money will never leave politics, though we can hope that the worst of it—the vast treasuries unleashed by the erroneous Citizens United decision—may someday be reigned in. Term limits would go a long way in addressing all sorts of these problems regardless of the state of campaign finance law. Legislators could more frequently remain people of integrity throughout their service. Big money could still take hold of seats, but its grip would be broken every few years. The insularity and detachment of being surrounded on all fronts by the voices of party leadership, special interests, the lobby, and not the electorate, would have much less time to set in. Corporations would see much smaller returns on their political investments, and the public would see greater returns if, through constitutional term limits, we trade corrupt continuity for a Congress of people-prioritizing representatives.
