Term limits tide recedes: Support for term limits has steadily declined as voters learn about the danger this deception poses to the Constitution. (Term Limits).

Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon closer inspection...

--Alexander Hamilton on term limits, The Federalist, No. 72

On January 24th, the Idaho House of Representatives voted 50 to 20 to scuttle a 1994 statute to impose term limits. Idaho's Senate followed suit, 27 to 8, on January 30th.

Such a term limits defeat may seem remarkable considering the waves of term limits fervor that rolled across the country during the 1990s. But unlike tides, the rise and fall of term limits did not result from natural forces. The movement was manmade from the beginning -- and so has been its demise as the enchantment of this terribly bad idea fades away.

Some Background

The term limits lobby began scoring victories at the polls in 1990, when voters in three states approved ballot initiatives capping the terms of their local, state, and/or federal officials. Between 1990 and 1994, another 18 states approved similar measures (in Utah and New Hampshire the state legislatures imposed limits). Rather than receiving thorough, sober scrutiny that such a drastic change in electoral policy merited, emotional campaigns largely fueled by special-interest money from outside each state beguiled even many conservatives to board the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. These conservatives erroneously perceived term limits as a potential solution to the domination of Congress by Eastern liberals. Since then, however, support for term limits has waned to the point that the juggernaut appears to have not merely slowed, but to have shifted into reverse, as voters have become better informed regarding the reasons why so many of our nation's Founders -- from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to John Adams and Gouverneur Morris -- adamantly opposed the notion of making lame ducks of elected officials via term limits. (*) They recognized that politicians who want to get re-elected will bend to the will of their constituents, while politicians who can no longer be re-elected have little incentive to worry about what their constituents think.

In fact, the Founding Fathers rejected term limits at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. And on May 22, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized this clear intent by ruling in US. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton that the U.S. Constitution precludes term limits for members of Congress, and that a constitutional amendment would be required to achieve that objective. Proponents of term limits promptly launched a campaign for such an amendment, including a call for states to convene a modern-day constitutional convention (con-con), if necessary, to conjure one up. Fortunately, that perilous approach has floundered, understandably, since only 17 states currently have term-limit laws on their books, and only two -- Louisiana by legislative action in 1995, and Nebraska by initiative in 2000 -- have adopted limits since the Supreme Court rendered its decision.