Corporate & Securities Law

The new term limits?

Let’s say you want to reduce the size of government. How exactly can one accomplish this objective in our system, which, as Peggy Noonan somewhat cleverly observed, always seems to be fighting spending battles on one side of the ruler?

One possibility is term limits. The story goes that if one prevents career politicians from holding particular seats for long periods, regular people will run government, and these people may be less susceptible to the ever-bigger ways of Washington. They will be less savvy about how to game this system in their favor; they will not be concerned about giving handouts to ensure their reelection; they will avoid the Stockholm syndrome-like trance of our capital. In short, they will be, to quote Bill Buckley, like the first hundred names in the Boston phone book, not the Harvard Law School faculty.

I will admit that I was a fan of term limits in the 1990s when the fiscal imbalances of the Reagan years and the recession of the Bush the Elder years caused another crisis. I also thought the Supreme Court was wrong (and Justice Thomas right) in US Term Limits v. Thorton. As a practical matter, however, the Supreme Court put an end to federal term limits, and, as the experience with them in California suggests, they might not be a good thing. (I still think the Court was wrong and that experimentation with federal term limits should have been allowed.)

With this avenue foreclosed, what are the new term limits? How about electing simpletons?

When one looks around the political landscape these days, there are some seemingly attractive politicians who talk or act right on spending. Governor Christie seems like one; so does Marco Rubio, although I know less about him. But what explains the support, both in votes and dollars, for the likes of Christine O’Donnell? Perhaps voters are attracted to her because she is like the random draw from the phone book. She is more like the mean voter than John Kerry or Mike Castle, and this might mean she is less susceptible to gaming or being capture by the system, either in her favor or to benefit her chosen special interests. Voters might want a simpleton who can robotically say “no.” To again paraphrase Buckley, to stand athwart the federal government’s path to ever-increasing power and say “no.”

This is, of course, a dangerous strategy. Some legislation must be done, and it requires thoughtfulness and smarts. In addition, it is a bit optimistic. I’ve criticized the optimism of liberals in the new consumer financial protection bureau — that they can get regulation right this time — and it seems like a similar criticism obtains here. I doubt given our current system that changing the politicians who claim to have learned from the past is going to really change things. After all, these are the arguments the president made during his campaign, although not on spending per se.

But it does seem that the pendulum has swung too far and that a return to some equilibrium is needed. As in all systems, the pendulum will swing back too far, only to head back towards the middle again. (This is a version of Noonan’s metaphor.) With that in mind, perhaps sending simpletons to Washington to just say no is exactly what we need.

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on September 19, 2010 (boomark / email).