Term limits for politicians – get involved in the primary election process

There was bipartisan condemnation for the President’s refusal to sign the bill into law.  But we would not have been put in that situation if the Congress had passed the bill when it was needed months earlier.  So, it is primarily the fault of Congress that Covid-19 economic relief was late and that the federal government was on the brink of shut down yet again.

The fact of the matter is that our representatives in Congress have failed to do the work they were elected to do for many years.   Consider job number one of the Congress – pass appropriations to fund the federal government.  The last time that the Congress passed a complete appropriations bill on time (before October 1) was 1996.   Since 1974, when Congress took primary responsibility for passing federal appropriations, appropriations for all segments of government have been passed before October 1 only four times.  In recent years, we have had multiple threats of government shut-downs and actual shut-downs, remedied only with temporary budget extension resolutions.

The Congressional approval rating over the past 50 years has generally been in the 20% range, except in periods of national crisis, when we seem to give them a break.  Yet 90% of Congressional incumbents are re-elected.  Do we need to review Einstein’s definition of insanity?   When we get really frustrated, we call for term limits.  But if members of the House of Representatives must face re-election every two years, and Senators every six years, don’t we already have term limits?  We simply must choose not to send incumbents back to Congress.

For 20 years beginning in 1988, I chose to vote against every incumbent who represented me at any level, including Congress.  If the incumbent was not running for re-election, I voted against the candidate from their party.   Occasionally, I voted for independent candidates (I voted for Kinky Friedman for Texas governor in 2006).   Back in the 1980s, incumbents were usually identified on ballots, so it was fairly simple.  The political parties apparently got wind of this strategy and now incumbents are not identified on ballots.  It takes some research to identify the incumbents for re-election from local to federal elections.   That is research we should probably be doing anyway.

I already knew by 2006 that my strategy to oust incumbents was not very effective, and Kinky Friedman’s sound defeat in the Texas gubernatorial election made me rethink that strategy.  By that time, the platform of the Republican party had been pulled to the far right by evangelicals and wealthy conservative activists.  Recently, I have found myself voting mostly for Democrats – a frustrating exercise in Texas.  Like most Texans I would describe myself as fiscally conservative, socially moderate and individual rights liberal.  Republicans and Democrats have become so polarized that neither party aligns to these values.  In my view, Republicans have become the party most responsible for dysfunction and division, thus my vote for Democrats.

That is not to say that I believe that Democrats can be trusted, or are more capable of governing.   Money has corrupted politics on both sides of the political spectrum (see the blog post on Money in Politics).   Plus, I do not think that I will convince a lot of people who typically vote Republican to start voting for Democratic candidates, even if I thought that was the solution.   The real solution is to take the influence of money out of politics by imposing term limits through the re-election process.

I will admit that I have not always participated in the primary election process, and I did not often take the time to educate myself about the candidates standing for primary election within the parties.  When I voted against incumbents, it did not matter to me if I voted for the Republican or the Democrat in the general election.  But recognizing that most voters will prefer candidates of one party over another, the primary election process is where we can all get involved.  By voting against the incumbent in the primary election, we can support our political party while imposing term limits on our elected representatives.

I understand that this is a simplistic view of politics and candidate selection.  We may want to return some incumbents to office if they are doing a good job.  At the same time, we should remove incumbents who are not doing what they were elected to do.  They should not get credit for taking uncompromising positions (whether those positions are popular or not) if nothing actually gets done.  It will be useful to have objective measures of effectiveness to evaluate incumbents, and for that matter, challengers.  In order to replace incumbents, we will need qualified candidates to run against them.  As long as we have a two-party system in the US, support for third party candidates is probably futile.  However, if we begin to unseat incumbents who are not doing a good job, we may be able to get qualified independent candidates to challenge incumbents within one of the two parties.  Some of us will need to become more active in helping to recruit candidates to represent us, or to consider running for office ourselves.  If we don’t take on this responsibility, we deserve the representatives that we get.

2020 was historic for the number of citizens who voted in the general election.  In order to make our elected representatives more responsive to citizen voters, we will need to take that same commitment to the primary election process.