[bodyfour]

After seeing how term limits work in the California state legislature, I stopped being a fan of them.

The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effective assembly members would end up forced to seek a "promotion" into the state senate if they wanted to stay in politics. This often meant challenging members of the same party. This ends with people constantly fighting their "allies" to scramble up the greased pole, rather than doing more useful work.

Of course, that can happen even without term limits (politicians are the ambitious sort) but they definitely accelerate the effect.

The worse problem is that all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists! Since they're now the only ones around with deep experience, they invariably get even more involved with crafting laws.

This actually dove-tails into the other problem with the lobbying industry: the revolving door from legislator to the lobbying firm. Even without term limits this happens all of the time. It's very common for a retiring US House member to immediately get a lucrative job lobbying their former colleagues. However in a term-limited legislative body this only gets worse. Not only do lobbyists become more powerful, but term limits provide a guaranteed flow of politicians needing a new job.

So, if you find yourself as a newly-elected politician in such a system and you actually want to make a difference, probably your best bet is to immediately find some lobbyists to get sweet with. They are the only ones with the experience to make the political machinery work, and they're probably your future employer as well.

So at least in my observation, the ultimate effect of term-limits is to transfer power from democratically elected representatives to well-funded special interests. By un-entrenching the politicians you're accidentally making another group even more entrenched.

By contrast, I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest. Imagine somebody who has been working on, say, education policy for decades. They know every policy detail, all of the stakeholders, all of the experts. In a world of term limits, how will such a person ever emerge?

All of the above is specifically about legislative term limits. I believe the case for executive term limits is much stronger.

[DougN7]

Thank you for your insights. It’s making me question if term limits is the solution I always thought it would be.

[pdonis]

> it caused unneeded intra-party drama

That seems like a problem with the parties.

> all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists!

Sounds like a reason to outlaw lobbying.

> I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest.

They're not actual experts in the actual field. They're experts in working the system to favor partisans of the field. Not the same thing.

An actual expert in an actual non-political field would be doing productive work in that field. The real root problem is that we expect politicians to be "experts" in anything other than making sure the government does the limited things it's supposed to do, and nothing else--we want to use the government as a tool to solve whatever problems we see, instead of as an umpire whose sole job should be protecting everyone's basic rights and stopping there.