Term limits: a bad idea whose time has passed.

• Author: Hatch, Orrin G.

BETWEEN 1990 and 1994, 22 states--from Alaska and California in the West to Maine and Florida in the East--enacted term limits for their members of Congress. This sudden outburst of support for Federal term limits--an idea that the Framers of the Constitution carefully debated, but rejected--clearly reflected a broader dissatisfaction and frustration with Congress.

There were, to be sure, ample grounds for this dissatisfaction and frustration. Forty years of one-party rule in the House of Representatives had produced an institution in which autocratic committee chairmen employed biased rules and bloated staffs to advance their own careers and agendas, as well as to bottle up needed reforms. The House banking and post office scandals and a series of House leaders resigning under ethical clouds or indicted on criminal corruption charges simply added to the sense that Congress was controlled by entrenched incumbents who completely had lost touch with the concerns of everyday Americans. The gluttonous appetite of the Federal government was fed by tax-and-spend, pork-barrel politics. Even worse, voters felt powerless to change the way Congress operated.

In this atmosphere of powerlessness, term limits seemed to many the only available weapon. As the slogan of one of the leading term limits advocacy groups put it, "Term Limits. It's Something You Can Do." Imposing term limits on Congress was much like hitting a stubborn donkey between the eyes with a two-by-four--it wasn't subtle or fine-tuned, but nothing else seemed able to get the beast's attention and get it moving again.

Two recent events require more careful consideration of the merits of term limits. First, the 1994 elections shattered many of the assumptions on which the need for Federal term limits was based. They showed that there already is something Americans can do to bring about change--they can vote. The voters in the 1994 elections imposed term limits on many members of Congress through the ballot box. Notably, they did so with the precision of a scalpel, not the brute force of a bludgeon.

At the same time that they re-elected--sometimes by overwhelming margins--those members they deemed deserving, they retired such powerful figures as the Speaker of the House, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the aspiring Senate majority leader. Fed up with the guardians of the liberal bureaucratic nanny state, voters not only gave control of the Senate to the Republicans, but, even more dramatically, ended the long-standing Democratic stranglehold on the House of Representatives.

Under the leadership of Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Kan.) and Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.), this first Republican Congress in more than four decades quickly set out to try to enact the substantive legislative reforms Americans long have been calling for: a balanced budget amendment; relief from unfunded Federal mandates and burdensome Federal regulation; welfare reform; a real crackdown on crime; tax relief for the middle class; and sizable spending cuts. In addition, Congress is streamlining its own internal operations, cutting staff and budgets, and reforming rules that have blocked open debate.

The second, and related, development is that Congress considered a constitutional...