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Term Limits: A Distracting Diversion
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10489 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,428 Words |
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Richard G. Lugar
Richard G. Lugar is the senior Republican senator from
Indiana. |
RESTORATION
Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery
of Deliberative Democracy
George Will
New York: The Free Press, 1992
260 pp., $19.95
Many readers of George Will's Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Democracy will approach this book seeking intellectual underpinnings for today's emotional term limits movement. The grounds for such an emotional surge are understandable. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have a huge majority that may be destined to stay that way for decades, barring an act of God. After a six-year interval (1981-86) of Republican majorities in the U.S. Senate, Democrat majorities seem to have settled in for many years to come.
Life for President Ronald Reagan was bearable because he was able to present programs and nominees for office to at least one sympathetic house for six years. Republican Senate committee chairmen took the Reagan proposals seriously, conducted hearings, and produced legislation, while pressuring their House colleagues to do likewise. But after the fall of the Senate to Democrats in the 1986 election, the Reagan administration was investigated, generally harassed, and ultimately dead in the water with regard to legislative production.
George Bush faced congressional hostility for all four years and, with Vice President Dan Quayle, demanded an end to implacable partisan opposition in Congress, with the hope that a constitutional amendment limiting terms would finish the careers of adversaries much sooner than election campaigns.
Rank-and-file Republicans took up the cause, especially Republicans challenging entrenched Democratic incumbents whose seats seemed impregnable, barring bizarre redistricting every ten years or a widely publicized scandal.
The partisan Republican "off with their heads" strategy on term limits would not have gained a critical mass in various statewide referenda without the general political revulsion of 1992, in which "right track/wrong track" polls consistently indicated that less than 20 percent of Americans felt the country was headed in the right direction.
Throughout most of the 1992 election campaign, more citizens disapproved
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