The Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is promising to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year. The Tea Party caucus’s response? I’ll see your $100 billion and raise you $2.4 trillion over 10 years.
Both groups are barking up the wrong tree or, to use a more appropriate animal analogy, putting the cart before the horse. The road to real deficit reduction, not a cosmetic nip and tuck, runs through term limits. If Americans are truly interested in shrinking the size of government — one of the takeaways from the 2010 midterm election — they can start by limiting the amount of time lawmakers are allowed to serve.
This would require a constitutional amendment, no mean feat, requiring as it does approval by a two-thirds majority in Congress. But not impossible either. Recent events in the Middle East demonstrate just how potent people power can be.
Would it surprise you to learn that newbies in Congress (those who have served six years or less in the House and 12 or less in the Senate) are more likely to vote for fiscal restraint than veteran lawmakers? Or that this finding was based on votes taken from 1995 through 1998, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress? Even Newt Gingrich’s class of ’94, determined to shrink the size and scope of government, couldn’t buck the Old Guard, according to the results of this Cato Institute study.
In the last two years, the spending increases in bills proposed by freshman House Democrats were 60% lower than those sponsored by their more senior colleagues, according to Peter Sepp, vice president for communications at the National Taxpayers’ Union. The GOP freshmen proposed 15% more cuts in spending than the old-timers.
From 1964 to 2008, the incumbency rate in the House of Representatives averaged 93%, according to the Center for Responsive politics, a non-partisan independent research group tracking money in politics. Even in a wave election like the 2010 midterms, where the GOP picked up 63 House seats, the re-election rate was 86%, the lowest since 1948.
So yes, Virginia, we have created a permanent ruling class, something the Founders feared. James Madison worried that without term limits, legislators would serve their narrow self- interest at the expense of the national interest. He was right.
When was the last time a constituent walked into his congressman’s office and asked for cuts in popular government programs? Unless you believe in fairy tales, a prerequisite for smaller government is short-term legislators.
From Bloomberg News.