The topic of this episode is, “Can term limits fix Congress?”
Many Americans, including possibly you, dear listener, look at Congress and think, “These people stink. They spend decades in Congress and are out of touch with the American people and pay too much attention to special interests.” This widespread feeling unsurprisingly leads to nearly 90 percent of Americans telling pollsters they favor term limits for legislators.
So would term limits be a helpful reform? To help us think through this question I have with me Dr. Casey Burgat, a professor at George Washington University. He is the editor of a new volume, We Hold These Truths: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025). It’s a fun book, and has contributions from a lot of smart people. The book also includes a chapter that Casey authored on this very topic of term limits for Congress. So who better for us to have on the program?
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
Casey, welcome back to the program.
Casey Burgat:
My pleasure, Kevin. Thanks for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
As I mentioned in my introduction, term limits are an incredibly popular idea among voters and nonvoters. What are the main arguments in favor of term limits?
Casey Burgat:
It’s worth pointing out that term limits poll about as well as anything can poll in 2025, and they historically have. They’re kind of seen and painted as a silver bullet because of a pretty simple equation.
Congress sucks. The people in Congress must suck. We must get them out. And term limits are a way that we can force them constitutionally to get them out of the chamber.
And so the popular arguments are basically fourfold. First, term limits would eliminate career politicians. They would make people go back to the proverbial farm and get a better mix of citizens, Second, they would decrease lawmakers’ reliance on lobbyists and special interest groups and big money donors—a drain the swamp type of argument. Third, term limits would reduce polarization, which I think everyone would agree that we need some of that going on. And then finally, they would increase the diversity of representation in Congress—basically, it would make Congress less old and white and rich. Those are the arguments, at least.
Kevin Kosar:
On the surface, these reasons seem pretty convincing. If things aren’t going well at a business or in anything, maybe you need better people in there. So let’s just swap these folks out, so you don’t get people coming to Washington DC and sitting here for 40 years and being bad at their work.
Casey Burgat:
Yep. So this is where a fundamental truth in politics comes in: that two things can be true at the same time. You can want new people and that turning them over can lead to better people, but also always beware of the simple fixes in politics.
If you just automatically force people out, then you are necessarily signing up for the just as likely—and probably even more likely—scenario where the people who will come in will be even worse than what you have right now. So you can be unhappy at the people you have, but instituting term limits will do nothing of those four things I mentioned above, but actually make all of those problems ultimately worse, resulting in a worse, more dysfunctional legislature that’s even more dependent on interest groups, if that’s even possible.
Kevin Kosar:
So your chapter in We Hold These Truths lays out the arguments in favor of term limits, but then proceeds to dismantle each of them. So let’s start with that first argument in favor of term limits: that we’ve got to get rid of these career politicians and get back to just having regular folks show up in the legislature and use good common sense to figure things out.
Casey Burgat:
It’s one of the first ones to advance and one of the first ones you got to dismantle to have any conversation about this.
So I’ll pose the question to you, Kevin Kosar. You have a PhD in government, you care about Congress, and you follow it and write about it. You would make a Perfect member of Congress. Do you want to run for the job?
Kevin Kosar:
Oh, no.
Casey Burgat:
No, and that’s the point. There is a subset of people where running for office is an actual goal that they have. It’s like in any industry. It is not costless to subject yourself to what politics is; in fact it’s probably getting even more costly, not just by the dollar amounts, but the fact that half the country automatically hates you, you have to defend your positions and the positions of people within your party, and attack the other side. It’s just a really tough job and there’s no escape from the privacy that you forfeit from when you do it.
Being a member of Congress is not for everybody, and what term limits advocates suggest is that the more average person you can get in the job, the better the results will be—that they’ll be more representative of the average American.
That’s never been true, and we shouldn’t think of that as a necessarily positive thing on its surface. This was true going back to the Founding era, when the richest, most connected, and most lawyerly invested in politics as a job. They weren’t just everyday plumbers or Americans walking around and saying, “I’m gonna just try politics for a few years.” And for us people who want an effective government, we shouldn’t treat it as a job where you can just show up one year, and there’s no learning curve associated with it. I don’t know an industry where we treat it the same way. I don’t want my doctor to be a plumber, right? Like I don’t want my pilot to not have gone to school or learned on the job.
I don’t want an average lawman or average lawyer to represent me—I want the best. And we should treat lawmaking in that same way. Experience matters, and we need to dispel the notion that a random draw of the citizenry is going to give us the most effective legislatures once they actually get sworn in.
Kevin Kosar:
I think that’s one thing that I did not fully appreciate until I got to Washington DC—that to be a legislator means that you have to like doing a lot of different things. You have to like people bugging you all day long and bringing you their problems. You also have to like learning a lot about stuff that you may not care about, but nonetheless you are going to have to take a stand upon and vote upon. Even the least-smart-appearing of the bunch in Congress are constantly reading and absorbing information. This is how they’re spending their time and bouncing from meeting to meeting to meeting. How many of us want to do that? That sounds like high school on steroids or something with high stakes.
Casey Burgat:
Exactly, and it’s phrased that way oftentimes for members where they’ve got a final every single day and then they have to pretend that they’re an expert in this stuff because, like you said, their name’s associated forever, evermore, with a vote that will impact lives. It doesn’t reach their desks if it doesn’t.
And so, no single member of Congress is qualified to be the member of Congress we think in our heads that they should be on every single issue, where on a Tuesday you can vote on health care subsidies and aid to Turkey and DOGE and ethanol subsidies and immigration all in one day—who knows all of that stuff to the degree that we expect our members of Congress? That’s one case to make for increasing what it means to be a member of Congress.
The wrong thing to do then is to institute term limits so that you’re only there for a short period of time, that if and when you actually start to know these things in a way that we expect them to, you’re about ready to have to look for another job.
Kevin Kosar:
Right, and if we drew names by lot and threw the average American into this position instead of having elections, they would absolutely hate their lives by the very end of the first day because this is just not how they wanted to spend their time.
Let’s get on to myth number two, which is, you want to drain the swamp. You want politicians not to be in the pocket of special interests and be listening too much to the lobbyists. The solution, then, seems to be to not let them stay long enough for that to happen—just boot them out after two terms or something. What’s wrong with that idea?
Casey Burgat:
Yeah, the argument is that you can’t keep them in DC long enough for them to build up relationships with the swamp creatures of Washington DC.
Again, two things can be true. Those forces exist out there. Everyone’s looking for access and influence and special interest groups are no different. But the second part of that is that members need them because they don’t have the capacity internally, something that you have spent a large portion of your professional life pointing out.
Term limits would do the exact opposite. If we think that they won’t be here long enough to develop those relationships, just imagine what happens when you don’t give them the chance to actually learn the job of being a legislator or, even worse, to invest in that job because they know they’re soon going to have to have another career.
If I told you that your job had a shot clock to it, you’re going to treat it differently than if you had an open ended ability to serve. Your investment would be less because you know you’re not going to get the ROI on the time that you put in. So this would increase the dependency of these lawmakers on everyone who isn’t in Congress because those experts are now on the outside looking in. We’re talking special interest groups, unelected staffers, because those are the ones who aren’t subject to term limits. They often can stay for decades and decades. And so just like when you and I are put in an uncomfortable position where we don’t know right from wrong or left from right, you go find someone who does and you take their word as gold.
So that’s what lawmakers would do when they don’t know the job they were just elected to do. They go ask lobbyists, they go ask staffers, they go ask the executive branch, or even worse, they don’t know the difference between what good information is and bad. It makes you vulnerable to that type of influence.
If you’re trying to reduce the influence of swamp creatures and make legislators individually have the ability and the experience to call BS on things, you do not want to remove that incentive to stay a little bit or at least invest in the job by making them soon need a new one. Term limits are just going to make them more dependent and they’ll care less because they’re soon to be on the way out anyway.
Kevin Kosar:
One thing that’s a little underappreciated outside of Washington, DC is so many of the kind of deep pocketed, well-organized interests employ people who used to work on Capitol Hill for a very long time, who know the ins and the outs, and have incredible subject area knowledge. So when one of those people come in to meet with a brand new member of Congress, the information asymmetries are absolutely severe.
I think it’s also a common assumption that if a member is not running for reelection, they could just blow off all the evil organized interests and be free to vote their conscience and this is going to be better and that’s why we should have term limits. What’s not right about that?
Casey Burgat:
This goes back to the, the subset of the population who will serve in these positions. They’re not going back home after serving in Congress. Would you spend 10 years of your life developing relationships, developing expertise, starting to have a reputation for something, just flush it down the toilet to go back to wherever you came from and start a different career? No.
They stick around. They find another politically adjacent job to keep that influence as high as possible. That’s just what humans do. Why would you forfeit it? And so just as you mentioned, we talk about DC and Capitol Hill as a revolving door, where people go in and out from the public sector to the private sector. But in reality, in almost all instances, it’s a one way door off the Hill to the private sector where they can pay you a lot more for those same relationships. Then members are in a position where they are lobbying their former colleagues for the changes that they were just so recently in a position to do themselves. They’re lobbying for change from the outside looking in.
So, it’s just a function of people don’t go home the way that we think that they do, and neither would you.
Kevin Kosar:
Right, if you’re going to invest in coming down here, you want to get as much out of the time as you possibly can. A listener might say, “You could just ban them from doing this.”
Well, yes, you could ban them from serving as a lobbyist proper for some number of years, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be put on as a member of a corporate board or a special advisor, or they can’t provide consulting services. And then what they’re actually doing is transmitting what they learned on the inside about how things work and leveraging their relationships in exchange for money.
And so the real irony here is that term limits would, instead of draining the swamp, actually push more creatures out onto K Street and other places who are going to turn around and get into the business of government instead of actually serving government.
Casey Burgat:
Exactly, you’ll not only put more creatures in the swamp, you’ll put more mud in the water so it’s even murkier. You can’t see what’s exactly going on because—as you just mentioned—this has been tried before where they’ve tried to outright ban former members of Congress from lobbying and subject them to transparency requirements. But as you said, what happens is that they just become lobbyists by another name—consultants, advisors, board members. What that means is that they are not then subject to the disclosures and transparency requirements that we put on lobbyists.
So this is where you get more of them with term limits, because they’re turning out at a faster rate and even less clear waters—if there was ever any clarity in these waters before, because now we don’t even know what they’re doing, what they’re lobbying on, how much, and for whom, which lobbyists have to file with as part of their disclosure acts.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s get to the last two arguments in favor of term limits. One is stopping polarization. If I understand it correctly, people reason that if you don’t have to run for re-election or if you haven’t been in DC for long, you won’t be trained in those partisan games and you won’t have been running through partisan primaries, so you going to be more inclined to just do the right thing.
And finally, the problem of old members of Congress— the “geezer” problem. We’ve have a number of high profile incidents in the last year or two of members of Congress who are just not in good health due to their very advanced age, who are being handled by their staff, and who are not coherent during hearings. The idea is, “If we have term limits, nobody could ever get to that point.” Polarization, the geezer problem—what do you have to say about those?
Casey Burgat:
Let’s do the polarization one first, and this is where it’s really helpful to have a historical lens about who’s being elected to serve in these positions.
In each and every one of the last two years for several cycles in a row, we’ve had fewer competitive seats than at any other time in our history. For over 90 percent of the House seats—about 400 of them—we know who’s going to win just based on their party label because they’re not competitive. We know exactly who’s going to win independent of who these people actually are—you can run a dog with an R next to it in certain districts and he’ll get elected, or a cat with a D next to it in certain districts and he will get elected.
So that means that these elections are effectively run in the primary, where about 15 to 20 percent of voters actually show up—the most partisan and extreme versions of these labels. To win an election in these uncompetitive seats, you have to win the primary appealing to the most extreme versions of your own party, and so when you force those elections to happen over and over and faster and faster, you’re going to quicken the rate at which these people are replaced by even more extreme versions of themselves.
In a term limit world—it’s amazing they lasted this long—you won’t have a Joe Manchin in West Virginia. We saw what happened when he announced his retirement—a pretty extreme, very ruby red senator coming to replace a Democratic senator. Same with Ohio and Sherrod Brown’s case. Mitt Romney, same thing. The more you replace these folks in an increasingly polarized electorate, the more polarizing senators or representatives you’ll get. With term limits, the polarization problem will speed up, not slow down.
And then on the geezer problem.
Yes, you have huge problems with age. The Senate’s never been older and we’ve seen really high profile instances of Mitch McConnell freezing, Dianne Feinstein dying while in office. Nancy Pelosi falling and breaking her hip. Chuck Grassley’s in his 90s and he’s a chairman of one of the most important committees. These are really really high profile instances of people serving for a decades and decades and decades. This matters.
But that’s an age problem; it’s not a tenure problem.
If you want people to be kicked out because of their age, ask for age limits, not term limits. Yes, with term limits you’ll get rid of the elder people because they won’t serve long enough with term limits to serve for that long, but you’re also going to kick out the really effective 52 year olds or the effective 62 year olds after 12 years of service, independent of how good they are, how healthy they are, how popular they are, or how bipartisan they are, because they get lumped in with the same folks who you see on TV freezing.
So, solve the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re worried about age, then pass a constitutional amendment instituting an age limit. That’s a very different conversation. It is not near as draconian as we argue that term limits would be.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, and I would say that with the geezer problem, it’s also the case that we shouldn’t assume that everybody in Congress comes here and stays for 40 years. In fact, the people who stay for 40 years are the exception to the rule.
What we have is a lot of people who are coming here and maybe they get in for three or four terms, but they’re not arriving until they’re 55, 60, or even older. And if you are worried about them aging themselves out in Congress, then certainly Congress adopting an age limit at which members are no longer permitted to serve would force people to make the decision earlier in their career. That’s a more direct way of doing it than, than term limits.
Casey Burgat:
A hundred percent. And it should be said that if you think Congress is rich and white and old now, just think about what would happen if you reduce the population. That’s because, to run for office—especially at the federal level and especially at the Senate level—it’s a two year commitment where you’re signing up for no career. Then if you do win, you’re splitting residences. It’s incredibly expensive, so obviously the people who are able to do that are going to be disproportionately wealthy compared to the average population, older, and more white.
And so if you institute term limits, you’re going to speed all that up too because you’re not only keeping those same things, but at the end of the equation, you’re also saying, “And you’re only can be here for about 12 years.” You can’t invest in this like you can a doctorship where people are willing to take on debt because you know you’re going to get paid back from a long career.
You’re effectively eliminating that possibility, meaning that you’re only going to reduce it to people who have all of those things I mentioned in scenario one—those who can do this for two years with no pay and then if they do win they’ll split costs—but also those who don’t care if they need to go find something else to do because they have got enough funds to cover that. It’s just going to make that exponentially worse, which will affect not only the age problem that we’ve already talked about, but also demographics—male female gender splits, income levels, the ability to raise a family within Washington DC, etc. If we think that’s bad, term limits are just going to make it all worse.
Kevin Kosar:
This is all the time we got for the program today, but let me just sum up.
If you don’t like career politicians, term limits are not the answer. If you want to decrease legislators’ reliance on lobbyists and their capture by special interests, term limits are not the answer. If you want to decrease polarization and have fewer elderly individuals in the chamber, term limits are not the answer.
Thank you, Dr. Casey Burgat, for helping us better understand the problems with term limits for legislators and to think a little more clearly about other ways that we might address problems in the chamber.
Casey Burgat:
Thanks so much, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
Stay in the know about our news and events.