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Aside from Bill Clinton's victory, certainly the biggest news on election day was the huge support won by the term-limits movement. Measures limiting the terms of members of Congress were on the ballot in fourteen states, and in all fourteen they won, only in the state of Washington by less than a landslide.
Of the fifteen states now in favor of term limits (Colorado was the first, in 1990), eleven would prevent members of Congress from running for reelection after they have served a certain number of years or terms (although their names could still be written in); the remaining four would prevent a Senator or Representative from serving more than twelve years, period. Advocates of term limits have targeted eight additional states for popular initiatives. The movement's ultimate goal, now a serious possibility, is a constitutional amendment.
Of course, Americans already have the power to vote out incumbents. But, perhaps to the movement's dismay, on election day the people did not exercise that power; instead, they returned 93 percent of current officeholders seeking reelection. The contradiction here is akin to the familiar one concerning federal spending: Americans seem to want to reduce spending in general but not when it comes to particular cases.
That contradiction and others are treated in two new books which, with exquisite timing, were published just before the election: Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy by the syndicated columnist George F. Will(*) and Cleaning House: America's Campaign for Term Limits by a former Congressman, James K. Coyne, and a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, John H. Fund.(**) The two books ably discuss the movement and offer most of the best arguments for term limitation. They also prompt reflection on how difficult it already is and will remain to limit not merely congressional terms but the big government that has evolved in this century.
The modern term-limits movement--its predecessor in 1947 resulted in the 22nd Amendment, restricting to two the number of terms a President may serve--caught fire after the congressional election of 1988, in which all but one Senate and six House incumbents were successfully reelected in the highest return rate in American history. Anti-Congress feeling was further fueled when, upon taking office, the new Congress...