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 fa- vor 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 constitu- tional amendment.

Of course, Americans already have the power to vote out incum- bents. But, perhaps to the move- ment’s dismay, on election day the people did not exercise that pow- er; instead, they returned 93 per- TERRY EASTLAND is a resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency.

cent of current officeholders seek- ing reelection. The contradiction here is akin to the familiar one concerning federal spending: Am- ericans 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 Lim- its, and the Recovery of Delibera- tive Democracy by the syndicated columnist George F. Will* and Cleaning House: America’s Cam- paign for Term Limits by a former Congressman, James K. Coyne, and a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, John H. Fund.t The two books ably discuss the movement and offer most of the best argu- ments for term limitation. They also prompt reflection on how dif- ficult it already is and will remain to limit not merely congres- sional terms but the big govern- ment that has evolved in this cen- tury.

THE modern term-limits move- ment-its predeccessor 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 incum- bents were successfully reelected in the highest return rate in Am- erican history. Anti-Congress feel- ing was further fueled when, upon taking office, the new Congress tried to give itself a 51-percent pay raise without a roll-call vote.

The reasons behind today’s widespread contempt for Congress are well known: the large staffs, the multiple offices, the free travel al- lowances, the generous pensions, the fat campaign coffers, the use of free mailing privileges-all com- bined with the refusal to abide by laws imposed on others. Then, too, there is the institution’s "do-noth- ing" image: "to many voters," write Coyne and Fund, "it seemed that the typical Congressman was only concerned about his career, his pay raise, and his perks." In 1989, after Congress was racked by major-league scandals, groups formed around the coun- try in support of measures to limit not only federal but also state- and even local-government (city and county) terms. This past Novem- ber, in addition to the fourteen measures limiting U.S. congres- sional terms, there were 42 other term-limits proposals on the bal- lot, and all but one passed-sug- gesting that majorities of voters think limiting terms is a good idea * Free Press, 260 pp., $19.95.

t Regnery Gateway, 235 pp., $21.95.54/COMMENTARY FEBRUARY 1993 regardless of the level of govern- ment.

When the new Congress con- venes, more than a quarter of the Senate and nearly a third of the House will be serving while a clock begins to tick. Incumbents in three states governed by such a clock have objected with lawsuits-their argument is that the Constitution specifies only age, citizenship, and residency as qualifications for members of Congress-and they may win in the courts. But with such large majorities in so many states on the other side (and with more probably still to speak), the politics of the issue are running the other way. Incumbents will find it especially hard if their opposi- tion to term limits is seized on by challengers as a campaign issue.

All in all, the likelihood is that Congress will send to the states a proposed constitutional amend- ment limiting terms, possibly be- fore the next congressional elec- tion.

WHAT would be the effect of such an amendment? Under a version limiting terms to, say, three for Representatives and two for Sena- tors (the arrangement most com- monly suggested), there would be a complete turnover in the mem- bership within six years for the House and twelve years for the Senate. The House and the Senate would thus change hands more rapidly than at any time since the last century, when most members served just one term and 40 to 50 percent of the seats changed hands in every election. Today, the aver- age congressional career is about ten years (double what it was at the start of the century), and the number of freshmen entering Congress has declined to roughly 10 percent.

Seen in this perspective, term limitation is an effort to go back to the future-back to a time when there were more contests among newcomers. And there is some- thing intuitively appealing about this effort, for it taps into what George Will calls "the democratic faith in the broad diffusion in the public of the talents necessary for the conduct of the public’s busi- ness." It is also true that having more contests among newcomers necessarily will work to the advan- tage of all of those not in power who want to serve, and this no doubt is one reason polls show big majorities of women and racial and ethic minorities in favor of term limitations.

The prospect of more open seats could also benefit the politi- cal parties. According to David W.

Brady and Douglas Rivers, profes- sors of political science at Stanford University, one effect of the "per- petual incumbency machine" which Congress has become has been to transform a party-based politics into one of personality.

Theoretically, term limits could restore to the parties the saliency they once enjoyed in voters’ con- sciousness. Of course, there is no guarantee that the parties would take advantage of this opportunity; but in an age when parties have declined, they would be foolish not to.

There are those-some oppo- nents of term limits are among them-who believe that the Demo- crats, having the greater number of incumbents, would have more to lose from term limits while the Republicans would have more to gain. And it is true that the Repub- lican platforms in both 1988 and 1992 supported term limits, while the Democratic platforms did not.

Still, since 1980 Democrats have won slightly more of the contests for open seats than have Republi- cans-so it would seem that, on the long view, Democrats have nothing to fear.

A weightier argument is that, by definition, term limits would end up restricting voter choice. Such, according to opponents of the measure, was the understanding of some of the original Founders.

Alexander Hamilton, for example, asserted that reeligibility for office is necessary to enable the peo- ple, when they see reason to approve of [the official’s] con- duct, to continue him in the sta- tion in order to prolong the util- ity of his talents and virtues, and to secure to the government the advantage of permanency in a wise system of administration.

Supporters of term limits like Coyne, Fund, and Will concede that Hamilton-and Madison, who argued along similar lines-were right in their time; but times are different. During the 19th century, they say, legislators did more of what the Framers thought they should do-deliberate the merits of public policy. Today legislators spend much more of their time serving as middlemen, making calls in behalf of their constituents to the many federal departments and agencies charged with admin- istering the law. Easily able to be reelected to a job that pays well and has excellent perks and plen- tiful staff, members have little in- centive to retire voluntarily, in the manner of their 19th-century fore- bears, but instead serve on and on.

WHETHER term limits would sig- nificantly alter congressional be- havior and make Congress a more deliberative body is hard to judge.

Legislators who know with cer- tainty that they will be leaving Con- gress (and will have to live under the laws they have passed) might be more disposed, as Will puts it, to "discriminate between appropri- ate and inappropriate functions for the federal government." On the other hand, term-limited Con- gressmen could be as self-serving as many of those we have now, bending the modern state to their own needs all the way through their final term of office.

Term limits would almost cer- tainly affect the so-called Iron Tri- angle spawned by the welfare state-in which congressional committees, career bureaucrats, and the various interest groups cooperate in the distribution of benefits to the public; but what the impact would be is unclear. Chair- manships of committees and sub- committees would change more rapidly, of course, but would term- limited chairmen be less person- ally ambitious or act more respon- sibly than chairmen in the past? The net effect might be to confer greater power on committee staff- ers or on careerists in the execu- tive departments and agencies; aOBSERVATIONS/55 movement to limit the tenure of bureacrats has yet to make its ap- pearance.

In brief, the benefits of the re- form are in danger of being over- sold. Under term limits, more new faces would come to Congress more quickly than they do now, and political parties would have more opportunities to assert them- selves. But no one can say to what extent, if any, the regrettable as- pects of legislative service would be reduced and deliberativeness promoted in a term-limited Con- gress.

As THESE two books make clear, today’s legislative careerism is made possible by what the federal government has become. Origi- nally restricted in the objects it could reach, Washington is now hardly prevented at all from touch- ing, and spending money upon, whatever it will. For Coyne and Fund, term limits would confront this problem directly; the move- ment, for them, is a legacy of Reaganism, and is "about" limited government in general. But it is hard to see how a measure that affects only tenure in office, as opposed to the powers exercised in office, could markedly alter the nature of modern government. It is also too much to expect that term limits would limit what peo- ple now routinely ask of their rep- resentatives.

For the fact is that the Ameri- can people have changed, too.

Even if they sometimes recognize that it may not be good for them or their posterity, they like the big government in Washington.

Twelve years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush-the most conserva- tive Presidents since Calvin Coolidge-resulted not in a down- sizing of the federal government but in its continued expansion.

The Department of Education, which Reagan originally vowed to abolish, is still there, bigger than ever; the Department of Vet- erans Affairs was established un- der him.

Nor did these two Republican administrations really press for structural reforms aimed at limit- ing government power or its exer- cise. A Reagan task force on feder- alism wound up deciding not to recommend a constitutional am- endment saying, in effect, that the only powers the federal govern- ment has are the powers enumer- ated in the Constitution. Nor did it recommend an amendment en- abling a majority of the states to veto federal legislation within a certain period after its enactment.

Those who look to term limits to restrict the government’s exer- cise of its powers need first to look to themselves. George Will puts his finger on the problem when he writes, on the final page of his book, "Americans must be less de- manding of government." If they were, incumbents might not be demanding to stay in office as long as they now do.