Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy.

• Author: Polsby, Nelson W.

The unhealthy tendency that today requires constitutional correction is the distortion of government and the demotion of Congress in the regime. That distortion and that demotion have been produced by legislative careerism predicated on constant abuse of the power of the purse.(1)

These sentences are as good as any to introduce the main themes of George F. Will's rambling and untidy argument in favor of congressional term limitations. Unlike many advocates of term limitations,(2) Will portrays himself as a friend of Congress, and his argument contains at least the rudiments of a causal theory. Legislative careerism is held to be the cause of a number of things that are wrong with Congress and that weaken the influence of Congress in the political system. Term limits are introduced as the cure that will strengthen Congress by abolishing legislative careerism.

An unusual feature of Will's argument is his eagerness to part company with a fair number of advocates of term limitations on various points that heretofore have been regarded as salient. For example, he professes indifference to the larger partisan or policy consequences of term limitations beyond an allegedly salutary effect on the pork barrel. Advocates frequently take the view that congressional term limits will help Republicans, since more Democrats are currently entrenched in Congress, and conservatives, because the longer members stay the more likely they are to vote for appropriations for governmental functions.(3) Will also refuses to praise legislative amateurism as a proper or relevant goal that term limits can achieve.(4)

Will enumerates a longish list of complaints about Congress and its operations that nobody heretofore has had the ingenuity to link with a lack of term limits. And for good reason; Will's case with respect to each is quite weak. He is annoyed, for example, with the redrawing of congressional district boundaries to create majorities for minority voters. These districts, Will says, "represent a new dimension of Washington arrogance and bipartisan cynicism in the service of incumbents."(5) In fact, redistricting is generally handled in the several states by state legislatures, and not in Washington at all. Members of Congress can only seek to influence the process indirectly. Redistricting has unseated incumbents in several cases, and threatened incumbents in many others.(6)

There are at least four other similar loose ends in Will's argument: (1) Will rightly observes that the operations of the legislative schedule make normal family life difficult for members of Congress. How will term limits help current members overcome this problem? Evidently by separating members from Congress, and hence from operations of the legislative schedule.(7) Will does not show how, if term limits were adopted, the same problem would not plague members who succeed the current crop. (2) Will notes that incumbent members use franked mail heavily, especially to help get reelected.(8) Term limits would solve this problem, he argues, by decreasing the number of incumbents running at each election. (3) "Term limitation," says Will, "would also help to reinvigorate our understanding of citizenship by reemphasizing the value of civic participation."(9) He suggests that this would be accomplished because long-term legislators monopolize public office, a form of civic participation, for long periods of time; but short-term legislators would not.(10) (4) Finally, Will argues that:

The rise of the career legislator is another reason for the rise of judicial activism in a climate of rights talk. This is so because legislative careerism begets in legislators an unsavory prudence, which in turn begets the impulse to solve society's problems by judicial fiats rather than political deliberation. Therefore term limits for legislators would help to limit the imperial judiciary.(11)

These arguments make for difficult reading because their relevance to term limits is hard to fathom, or because Will's facts are wrong, or because Will thinks getting rid of incumbents will get rid of problems that hang around Capitol Hill regardless of how long incumbents serve.

The core of Will's argument lies elsewhere, and can conveniently be examined by considering three questions to which he returns affirmative answers:

1. Will term limits improve congressional deliberation?

2. Will term limits reduce congressional interest in seizing local

   advantage?

3. Will term limits increase the power of Congress in the political

   system?

   I.Deliberation

   Will defines deliberation, in the abstract, as "a disposition to reason about policies on their merits."(12) He describes it as an attribute of individual members' thought and judgment, as whatever it was that Burke recommended to the electors of Bristol, and as not merely obtaining goodies for the home folks.(13) Will contrasts deliberation with ratification.(14) He traces it to its linguistic root in Greek as "to weigh."(15) One member of Congress (Charles Vanik, D., Ohio) is called to witness that members have no time to do it. (16) A deliberative institution, Will says:

   [I]s one in which members reason together about the problems confronting the community and strive to promote policies in the general interest of the community. The deliberative process involves identification and investigation of social needs, the evaluation of programs currently attempting to meet these needs, and the formulation of new legislative remedies for recalcitrant problems. On the surface, Congress seems to be in the business of informing and persuading - the essence of a deliberative process.(17)

   According to Will, however, this is not what Congress is actually doing: it is engaging in "mere posturing in the service of careerism."(18)

   How can Will possibly know this? Even if it were to be the case - which no careful observer of Congress could possibly concede - that each and every participant in each and every congressional transaction - committee hearings, mark ups of legislation, floor debates, conferences - was personally motivated by nothing but career concerns, venality, selfishness, and/or other base motives, it still would not follow that the collective result would discourage deliberation. Ever since 1776, when Adam Smith described how a market supplying goods useful to the community might arise from the self-interested behavior of many actors, social observers have had to confront the possibility of a gap between individual motives and collective outcomes.(19) Not even a good case about individuals and their motives can exempt an author from a serious look at the institution and its workings.

   But Will's case about individuals is not especially good; he delves only anecdotally into individual actions, some horrible, some trivial, invariably assigning base motives.(20) As to the absence of deliberation from the actual collective work of Congress, some of which any of us can observe on C-SPAN, he makes no case at all.(21) And so we must ask: Does Congress, as currently constructed, deliberate? If we can think of deliberation as the introduction...