The Legislative Shuffle.

• Author: WALLISON, ETHAN
• Position: Term limits

The pros and (mostly) cons of term limits

BEING SPEAKER OF THE OHIO HOUSE OF Representatives these days means changing Finance Committee chairmen about as often as you get your hair cut. Speaker Joanne Davidson has had three such chairmen in this year alone. And that's only the beginning of her problems. All told, 13 House members have left the legislature in mid-session this term and, says Davidson, "I'm sure we'll see more before the end of the Year."

Thirty-nine members of the Ohio House--Davidson included--will be forced out this year, when the eight-year term limits that voters imposed on members of the state House and Senate in 1992 finally ripen. A full third of the members who would have been termed out this year have already left, snatching the first attractive opportunities to come their way. They've got families to feed, and no future in the Ohio House of Representatives.

Though just a handful of legislatures have had experience with the reform to date, the full implications of term-limit measures passed in states across the country in the early and mid-'90s are beginning to come into focus, and the results aren't looking good. Legislators are doing more things that either are of questionable value (career padding) or undermine the political process (partisan infighting); they don't understand their jobs as well as they used to; instability has become the norm, and inefficiency the result. Members are becoming less collegial, less efficient, and may even be more influenced by the same special interests that term limits were supposed to neutralize. And in Ohio, they're just bailing out.

Even if you believe it is intrinsically good to shuffle the decks in the legislatures every couple of years, term limits have been, at most, a partial success. If you believe that a capable legislature is necessary to the orderly functioning of a state government, then term limits should give you great cause for worry.

In The Mood

Term limits were what you might call a mood reform. America seems to love experts in everything except for government, and the movement grew out of a visceral sense among voters across the country that the elected "experts" in the legislative process had "lost touch." People believed that legislators had created an entrenched political class whose principal interest was its own self-perpetuation. Voters saw signs of this estrangement everywhere. In Maine, a government shutdown in 1991 brought about the push for term limits, while a subsequent ballot tampering scandal added momentum; California's term-limits movement was set in motion in the 1980s by a brutal partisan battle over redistricting.

But the major factor--the one that gave the movement its national scope--was a cluster of...