Push the limits.

LAST year, in a heated debate on congressional term limits, a veteran congressional Democrat pounded his fist on the lectern and complained that limiting terms would ultimately leave America with "a Congress of mediocrity." To his astonishment, the audience cheered. Most Americans support term limits precisely because they think mediocrity would be a vast improvement.

But now come Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate for the first time since Strom Thurmond was in his fifties. We may have finally arrived at a Congress of mediocrity even without term limits.

At least congressional Republicans seem to think so. Ever since the election, senior Republican legislators have assumed the lead role formerly held by vanquished Speaker Tom Foley in trashing term limits. This has put the party apparatus in an awkward position, since a first-ever floor vote on term limits is a central promise of the Republican Contract with America. It's right there in black and white under the heading, "Replacing Career Politicians with Citizen Legislators."

Mr. Smith Stays On

Apparently not all Republicans really believe that career politicians should be replaced with citizen legislators. The GOP, after all, has its fair share of politicians who have come to view their congressional seats as a sort of lifetime entitlement. Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and Senator Phil Gramm (Tex.) are at best lukewarm to the idea. Senate GOP veterans Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) have resorted to recycling the Left's standard line that term limits would purge Congress of its "experienced legislators" (they mean this as a criticism) and that more power would wind up in the hands of unelected congressional staffers, career bureaucrats, and corporate lobbyists. The latter is a particularly unconvincing claim, since opinion polls reveal that the only people in America who oppose term limits are congressional staffers, career bureaucrats, and corporate lobbyists. It's doubtful that the three thousand or so Democratic staffers who were thrown out of work when their members were de-elected on November 8 are feeling very empowered right now.

Henry Hyde (R., Ill.), the skillful orator and new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has also stepped up the velocity of his objections to term limits. "When a crisis comes," argues Representative Hyde, "you want people who have been tested--and you don't get them out of a phone book."

It isn't exactly clear which recent crises Americans are supposed to be thankful we had experienced legislators around to rescue us from. The $4-trillion debt crisis? The $250-billion savings-and-loan crisis? The healthcare inflation crisis? The House Bank crisis? Dan Rostenkowski's postagestamp crisis? Not only have the experts in Congress not solved these crises, it was precisely the experts who created them. Most taxpayers see little risk that amateur politicians will do a worse job of managing the nation's financial affairs than the "people who have been tested." The 75 per cent of Americans who support term limits seem to be saying, in effect, "Yes, by all means--give us the names in the phone book."

After the election, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (Tex.) provoked an avalanche of irate phone calls by proclaiming that "if Republicans straighten out the House, the public's desire for term limits will be diminished." Armey quickly reaffirmed his support for term limits, but critics suspected he had simply said what most GOP congressional veterans were thinking: Term limits? Who needs them now?

Some Republicans have resorted to counterfeit term limits: six terms in the House. Newt Gingrich, who wants eight years as Speaker, says he is "deeply opposed to a three-term limity." Yet all but two of the term-limit measures passed by the states call for a three-term cap, which a Frank Luntz poll finds 82 per cent of voters support. At a recent rally, term-limit supporters booed Bill McCollum (R., Fla.), the lead sponsor of a weak term-limits measure in the House. As one protestor put it, "Six terms is a career."

Let Us Count the Ways

THERE ARE several reasons Republicans would be foolish to withdraw their support for term limits. First, term limits will lead to better policy results. A Cato Institute analysis shows that if only junior members of Congress (those with three terms or less in the House and two terms or less in the Senate) had voted during the past ten years, Congress would have approved the balanced-budget amendment, the line-item veto, and Ohio Representative John Kasich's spending cuts. And Congress would not have approved the two largest tax hikes in history: Bush's and Clinton's. It was the veterans of both parties, the people who had been "tested," who blocked the former list of initiatives and provided the margin of victory for the latter. In other words, there is a culture of spending in Washington that tends to infect politicians as they stay there longer.

Moreover, the propensity to become friendlier to the tax-and-spend culture over time is more discernible for Republicans than for Democrats. As the party of government, Democrats tend to come to Washington comfortable with the concept of spending other people's money. For Republicans, it's a learned behavior. So the Republican takeover of Congress only strengthens the case for term limits.

Term limits would also allow voters to seize back power from Washington's professional ruling elite. Professional politicians are not healthy for a democracy. When people spend their whole lives in politics they become comfortable with command-and-control ideas that are alien to the rest of us. To put it another way, they end up thinking much like Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

The political process in America has a severe adverse selection bias, since those who devote their lives to elected office are likely to have a ruling-class mentality. As one board member of U.S. Term Limits puts it: "The kind of people in public office today are the same people who volunteered to be blackboard monitor in the sixth grade." By contrast, those of us who aren't interested in meddling in other people's affairs aren't likely to devote a lifetime to doing exactly that. A true citizens' legislature achieved through term limits would largely end the professionalization of politics and yield a Congress more representative of the views of the American public.

The more important reason for Republicans to get on the right side of this issue is that term limits are a fait accompli. By overwhelming margins, Americans in 22 states (even in New York City and Washington, D.C.) have proclaimed in the last four elections that they want term limits, and they will do whatever it takes to have them--regardless of what the courts, the Congress, or the Washington intelligentsia think about it.

In the last elections the term-limits movement showed itself to be an awesome political juggernaut. Americans for Term Limits was largely responsibly for taking out Speaker Tom Foley, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, and term-limits poster child Dan Rostenkowski. Although 91 per cent of incumbents who ran in 1994 won--this is the "record turnover" that term-limit opponents have been trumpeting--only 47 per cent of anti-term-limit incumbents were reelected. Exit polls reveal that three out of four voters said they were more likely to support a candidate who favored term limits. Republicans should get aboard the term-limits steamroller, not in front of it.

In 1994 U.S. Term Limits raised some $1.3 million for voter education to help evict 23 anti-term-limit Democrats from Congress. In 1996 they are expected to raise twice that amount. Scott Rasmussen of the North Carolina Term Limits Coalition remarks that if the GOP blocks term limitation this year, "the political casualty will not be term limits; it will be the GOP." He's right. Americans like term limits more than they like Republicans.