@) AMERJCAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE AEIFORUMS
How long Should They Serve? Limiting Terms for the President and Congress
John Charles Daly, moderator Charles Bartlett Walter Berns John C. Danforth Jeane J. Kirkpatrick The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, established in 1943, is a publicly supported, nonpartisan, research and educational organization. Its purpose is to assist policy makers, scholars, businessmen, the press, and the public by providing objective analysis of national and international issues. Views expressed in the institute's publications are those of the authors and do not neces sarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.
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John Charles Daly, moderator Charles Bartlett Walter Berns John C. Danforth Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Held on April 17, 1980 and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D. C. Publication of this pamphlet is an activity of AEI' s project IIA Decade of Study of the Constitution," funded in part by a Bicentennial Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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AEI Forum 40
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ISBN 0-8447-2183-2 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 80-067961 Printed in the United States of America OHN CHARLES DALY, former ABC News chief and forum mod !ator: This public policy forum, part of a series presented by the American Enterprise Institute, is concerned with an issue our Found ing Fathers struggled with in the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781, and in the Constitution of the United States, drafted in Phil adelphia in 1787. Our subject: "How Long Should They Serve? Lim iting Terms for the President and Congress." In the debate in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadel phia, the framers of the Constitution first agreed to a single, seven year term for the president; later, they accepted that the seven-year term should be renewable; they furthermodified that to a renewable six-year term; then they changed back to a single, seven-year term; and, finally, after three months of vigorous argument, they agreed on a four-year term, remaining silent on the matter of renewable terms. In that long debate, proposals were also made for single eight-, eleven-, fifteen-, and twenty-year terms, and for no more than six years of service out of twelve, and for service "during good behavior." In our time, a two-term limit for the presidency was mandated in 1951 by the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution. As for service in the Congress, the 1787 Constitutional Convention vigorously debated terms of four, five, six, seven, and nine years for the Senate and, finally, compromised on a term of six years, with a safeguard that one-third of the senators be elected every two years. For the House, there was argument over a one-year or a three-year term. The final compromise was the current two-year term. And for both the Senate and the House, the question of limiting total tenure was never a major issue. Since that Constitutional Convention, nearly 360 proposals have been introduced to alter the president's term. Some 180 of these proposals have been for a six-year term, and half of those have in cluded single-term limitations.
1 Most of the proposals to limit the number of congressional terms are rather recent; in fact, three-quarters of them have been introduced since 1970, and fifty in the past seven years. Presidents Jackson, William H. Harrison, Polk, Hayes, Cleveland, Taft, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter favored a single term for the pres ident. President Jackson, in 1830, made perhaps the classic argument for a single term for the president. In order, particularly, that his appointment may as far as possible be placed beyond the reach of any improper influ ences; in order that he may approach the solemn responsi bilities of the highest office in the gift of a free people un committed to any other course than the strict line of Constitutional duty, and that the securities of this inde pendence may be rendered as strong as the nature of power and the weakness of its possessor will admit, I cannot too earnestlyinvite your attention to the propriety of promoting such an amendment to the Constitution as will render him ineligible after one term of service.1 In view of President Jackson's fabled temper, it is probably well that he and Harry Truman lived at different times. Noting that one does not have to be very smart to know that an officeholder not eligible for reelection loses a lot of influence, Presi dent Truman bluntly disagreed: You have taken a man and put him in the hardest job in the world, and sent him out to fight onr battles in a life-and death struggle-and you have sent him out to fightwith one hand tied behind his back, because everyone knows he can not run for reelection. . . . If he is not a good President, and you do not want to ke�p him, you do not have to reelect him. There is a way to get ridof him and it does not require a constitutional amendment to do it.2 To each member of the panel, I pose the question, Should presidential and congressional terms be limited?
JOHN C. DANFORTH, U.S. senator (Republican, Missouri): I have in troduced resolutions for constitutional amendments to limit the num ber of terms a person can serve in the Congress. I have excluded presidents from that because, on the presidential question, I can see
1 Quoted in Limiting Presidentialand Congressional Terms, AEI Legislative Analysis (Wash ington, O.C.: American Enterpirse Institute, 1979), p. 11. 2 fuid., pp. 15-16.
2 the pluses and minuses of such an amendment, but I feel strongly about terms for members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. I think that it is dear to anybody who spends time on the hustings, as those of us in politics do, that there is a very serious breakdown of communication and trust between the American people and their government in Washington. Most people in Missouri with whom I talk really ·distrust Washington. They feel that it is a remote place- as someone said, ten-miles square, surrounded by reality. It is in habited by strange people called "bureaucrats" who root for a strange football team known as the Redskins. Washington seems to them to be a different world from what they know in the state of Missouri. I think that we are rethinking our existing way �f doing things and searching for some mechanism to dose the gap between Washington and the American people. We want to make it dear that at least those who serve in the Congress of the United States are not full-time politicians, full-time inhabitants of Washington, but are really citizens on leave to their government for a limited number of years, and that they will eventually be returning home to the people who sent them there in the first place.
JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute: I oppose limitations on terms for the Congress or further limitations on terms for the presidency on several grounds. I believe basically that the proposals would not accomplish the proposed ends, but would, in fact, produce unanticipated and undesired harm. I think, first, that to liberate presidents from the temptations of ambition would, in fact, liberate presidents still further from the dis cipline of accountability, from that great motive to the public good, as Gouverneur Morris called it, of seeking reelection, which many of us think helps keep presidents responsive. I think that to free presidents from the pressures of the interests would, in fact, leave them less concerned about building and seeking consensus, would leave them less responsive to the views and values of voters, and would produce a less representative government. Freeing the people from full-time politicians, as Senator Danforth suggested, would, in fact, emancipate the politicians from us, the people. It would deprive us of experienced leadership and of a choice that is rightly ours, namely, the choice to allow our congressmen and presidents to continue in office or to throw the rascals out. Finally, I think that instead of wiser legislation and better public policy, we would get weaker presidents and weaker Congresses, men and women less able to solve problems, most specificallyless able to
3 control the bureaucracy, and, finally, less able to govern in a com plicated world.
CHARLES BARTLETI, syndicated columnist: George Washington warned us of the love of power and the proneness to abuse it that predom inates in the human heart. It is for that reason that I am strongly in favor of both of these reforms. I believe that the presidency would be liberated, not from politics, but from the strings that now tie it down and make it impossible for the president to be what Woodrow Wilson wanted him to be, which was as big a man as he can be, in conscience and in law. I think we have a president now who does not have a four-year term, but a three-year term, because he is faced with the necessity of campaigning in the final year of his term. He must shake hands across airport fences and do all the things that politicians have done with great success in different parts of the country, but which do not become a president; they subject him to unnecessary hazards and limit his ability to carry on the functions of government. When our great forefathers wrote the Constitution, I think they contemplated a system in which the president of the United States would be the chief magistrate and would be given the respect that would enable him to do the job. I think that now we ask the president to do 'considerably more than any one man can do. For that reason, I am heartily in favor of the one-term presidency. I join Senator Danforth in his feeling that we should limit service in Congress because we do not bring in the talent that exists in the country, and we become attached to members who become more isolated from the electorate as they gain seniority.
WALTER BERNS, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute: We have to remind ourselves that these proposals are constitutional amendments. I think there is something to be said against constitu tional amendments in principle: that is to say, I would start with the assumption that the Constitution, in a sense, is perfect; it ought not to be tampered with. Since 1960 some 4,000 proposals to amend the Constitution have been introduced in Congress; many of these, of course, were repe titions. Of these, four have led to constitutional amendments. We now have two that have been proposed, formally adopted by the House and the Senate, and are awaiting ratification by the states. In any individual case, a strong argument has to be made for the amendment, a heavy burden has to be borne by those who propose amending. I know Senator Danforth and Mr. Bartlett would agree
4 with this. The question then comes down to whether they can suc cessfully bear the burden. I agree with many of the things that Professor Kirkpatrick has said and would add only one other element. To be found frequently in the literature advocating these two amendments is the term "citizen legislator." That phrase reminds us of the position adopted by the Anti-Federalists in 1787 and 1788, the idea that the ideal senator or congressman legislator would be a kind of Cincinnatus who would put his plow down temporarily, come to Washington, serve in office here, but even during the time he was serving in the public office, his principal business would remain plowing. I somehow think that the job of a congressman or a senator is, especially in our day, more exacting than that. It requires more ex perience, more talents. I, therefore, do not believe in the idea of citizen legislator. And to the extent that these proposals embody that notion, I am opposed to them. SENATOR DANFORTH: Based on firsthand experience, I don't think that being a member of the Congress of the United States involves the possession of some technical talent. Learning the rules of the Senate is something that can be mastered by most people with any degree of intelligence. More important than any technical skill is the matter of judgment. It is my view that there are thousands of people in any state who have excellent judgment and could do an excellent job serving either in the Senate or in the House of Representatives. I think that this whole view that Washington is a very special place where only the insiders understand what is going on is simply a mistaken judgment. One of the problems in Washington is that we tend to focus on the technical matters, on the details, to the exclusion of the general principles of what the size and shape and scope of the federal government should be and what its relationship to the Amer ican people should be. I don't view government, and particularly the federal government, as being a fine art so much as a matter of judgment. The people in my state believe that Washington has been overrun by the experts, the consultants, the people who have mastered all the details of Washington, and, therefore, the government is even more remote from the basic judgment and the basic common sense of the people. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: Once again I must say I find myself in dis agreement with Senator Danforth. I agree with him entirely, however, that technical knowledge and technical expertise is not what makes a good legislator, much less a great legislator. I think it's quite clear that it is judgment that makes a great legislator, or even a good one,
5 and that judgment is very closely related to experience. Decisions in public policy are prudential decisions that aren't technical at all, but involve knowledge of the country, knowledge of the issues, knowl edge of how the government functions, knowledge of the pitfalls between intention and implementation. And I think, as the Marxists like to say, it is no accident that our greatest legislators have been men of long experience in the Congress, men like Henry Clay, Robert Taft, George Norris, Hubert Humphrey. We could expand that list almost indefinitely. Finally, I would like to emphasize that I don't believe that limiting the terms of Congress is relevant to the problem of alienation of citizens from government or of citizens' feeling that Washington is a very odd place. I think that that alienation, which concerns us all, has more to do with the content of the decisions that are made, and especially with the extraordinary growth and scope of bureaucracy; the control of bureaucracy both in the Congress and in the executive departments requires very sage and seasoned and wily legislators, in my opinion. MR. BARTLETI: Does Professor Kirkpatrick think, though, that expe rience in Washington is really what we need to make a government that is representative, that really works in terms of the people? It seems to me that the problem is that members of Congress may have this tremendous Washington experience, but they don't have expe rience with the world, or with the people. They do not live with the laws that they write. In the Washington way of life, Congress is in session all twelve months of the year now. The members are here constantly. They live here. Their families are here. Their golf bags are here. This is their life. When they retire they tend to stay here. A survey I did showed that two-thirds of the retired members of Congress live in the Wash ington area. They go home because they have to stay in contact with the people, and they do that with a discipline which I find very admirable. But I think it makes life very tough for the people in Congress. I'm surprised that so many of them want to stay around for as long as they do. Being a member of Congress has become a Washington operation, but I submit that what we perhaps need and what would tie this institution of government closer to the people is a little more expe rience out there where the people are. PROFESSOR BERNS: May a panelist ask a question? I know this is some what unfair-it's an exaggeration-but it will focus our minds, I think, on something that is important here.
6 A few years ago, Senator Abourezk, Senator Gravel, and Senator Hatfield, as I recall, proposed an amendment, a kind of popular initiative proposal whereby, if 3 percent of the people who had voted in a previous election so indicate, an initiative is put on the ballot of the next federal election to be voted up or down as law without amendment. This, I think, is carrying the point you gentlemen make to its extreme.
SENATOR DANFORTH: No, it isn't.
PROFESSOR BERNS: You mean, it's not an extreme. And would you accept that?
SENATOR DANFORTH: No. I don't think it has anything to do with that.
PROFESSOR BERNS: Well, I think it has, insofar as it represents this notion of the citizen legislator carried to the extreme of abolishing the legislator altogether and simply removing that legislator as a man between public policy and the people. But you would not be in favor of that, and I presume Mr. Bartlett would not be either.
MR. BARTLETT: No, I would not be in favor of that. I think one of the problems we have in the country is too many elections. That is one of the advantages of the six-year term. We would increase the House term to three years. Mr. Zamya tin of the Kremlin Secretariat complained recently that one really can't do business with the United States because it is always having an election. There's some truth in that. We are constantly involved in campaigning.
SENATOR DANFORTH: In response to that I will say that I believe in a republican form of government. I believe in representative govern ment. I don't believe that we should govern by public opinion polls, but through the legislative process, the process that has served our country very well now for the last two hundred years. I do believe, however, that some new things have entered into the picture since our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. For ex ample, the technique of polling, the use of the media and the tre mendous advantage incumbents have in the use of the media, and the organization of interest groups, which are able to disseminate their views to their membership in a very efficient and effective way, are changes since the Constitution was adopted. The effect of these
7 changes is to make the process of electioneering much more effective and sophisticated than it was when the Founding Fathers set up the Constitution. The problem that has been created for representativegovernment, therefore, is that congressmen are so anxious to appeal to each interest group-to do everything to keep themselves in office just one more term-that instead of government's really being a matter of dealing with broad issues of policy, it is more or less like a baseball player fielding fungoes. It is taking care of one interest after another. It is doing whatever can produce a press release for today. It is taking one day at a time in order to create the best image, with a view always toward staying in office. It seems to me that the greatest advantage of a constitutional amendment limiting terms is precisely that it says to congressmen that they will not be in Congress forever, that, eventually, they will be going home to the real world, and that governing is not a matter of saying anything, doing anything, promising anything to each in terest group that comes along.
MR. BARTLETI:The perception of the public of what the elected official is up to, it seems to me, is very much at issue here. When President Carter made his pronouncement in favor of the one-term presidency, he complained that a lot of things he does are colored by the news media, and the American people question whether his actions are in the best interests of the country or for personal political advantage. This is true for our legislators, also. As a member of the press I can say that there is a constant tendency to believe that those in office are maneuvering to their own advantage, are constantly striving to get some personal advantage out of public affairs with complete dis regard of the national interest. I think this is the reason we tend to berate our president so heavily. It is also the reason why less than 25 percent of the American people approve of the actions of Congress as a whole.
PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: If the people imagine that all members of Congress spend their time principally thinking about how to be re elected, then the people are obviously very badly informed.As every body knows, the retirement rate has never been so high in the Con gress as in the past few years. The turnover rate in the Congress is so high now that forty-nine members of the Senate and nearly half of the House have been elected for the first time since RichardNixon resigned. We have, in fact, a relatively inexperienced Congress filled
8 with lots of new faces, and we have thirty, forty, fifty people each year choosing not to run again, not liking the life on the Hill. I'd like to bring up another point, if I may. This search for the perfectly disinterested legislator or the perfectly disinterested presi dent, the notion that we can find a lawgiver or a lawmaker who will find the perfect solution to public policy problems is a very old one. Plato undertook it many years ago and proposed a philosopher king. The only problem with it is that it rests on a conception of politics that is technocratic and that sees political problems as problems in mathematics that have one correct answer. This theory contends that we can find the perfectly wise, the perfectly virtuous, the perfectly all-seeing lawmaker who will make the perfectly disinterested law, if only he is freed of ambition. I think this is a mistaken theory of psychology and politics. It is bad theory and bad practice.
SENATOR DANFORTH: No, that's not true. You set up a straw man then knocked it down very well, but it doesn't have anything to do with the argument that we're making.
PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: Well, I'm glad I knocked it down well.
SENATOR DANFORTH: Nobody is suggesting that there can be a per fectly disinterested human being, or that there can be a perfectly crafted solution to very complicated problems. That's not the point. The question is, Are the problems best addressed by people who have their sights fixed on something a little higher than winning the next election? I think it is true of the political system now that even though some members of Congress do decide to get out, there are many others whose every move has to do with winning the next election. I don't think that fielding the requests and the demands of every interest group that comes along in order to win the next election is in the service of the majority of the people, although it is good politics for those who happen to be good politicians.
MR. BARTLETT: There is sometimes the feeling that the most intelligent people are retiring and leaving the others behind. Dr. Kirkpatrick talks about this tremendous turnover, but the fact is committee chair men in the House have an average tenure of twenty-three years versus the mean tenure in the House of about nine years. So, Dr. Kirkpatrick is right on one score but wrong in terms of the people who really control the body.
9 PROFESSOR l MR. DALY: Let's come at this from another direction. I referred to President Truman's view that one does not have to be very smart to know that an officeholderwho is not eligible for reelection loses a lot of influence. Would an official have more or less influence with the other parts of government, such as the bureaucracy, if the term of service were limited? SENATOR DANFORTH: I don't really think that the case could be made that a member loses influence by deciding not to serve any longer. In the Senate, for example, in the Ninety-sixth Congress, those who have decided to retire, such as Abe Ribicoff, from Connecticut, and Henry Bellmon, from Oklahoma, have an enormous amount of clout, both within the Senate itself and, I believe, within the govern ment as a whole. So, I don't think, at least in the Congress, that a person loses any influence at all by making the decision to retire. MR. BARTLETT: I would like to add to that the Eisenhower record. I don't think anybody here would contend that Dwight Eisenhower was at the nadir of his power at the momerit he left the presidency, in 1961. I think he went out as strong and as influential as he came in, and there was no tailing-off in his administration. Indeed, many people who have analyzed the Eisenhower years found his second term in some ways more productive than his first. SENATOR DANFORTH: I think it is fair to say that in the year 1980, an election year, the business in the Congress of the United States has slowed down to a virtual halt. The Senate doesn't meet on Fridays, so that senators can go home and campaign. There are very few votes on Mondays, so there can be three- or four-day weekends of cam paigning. And initiatives from the White House have slowed down to virtually nothing at all. There are those who feel that that's a good thing; the less legislation, the better. But I don't think that the approach of an election has a positive effect on the activity level of the Congress. 10 PROFESSOR BERNS: One of the things that concerns me is the condition of political parties in this country. It is difficult to make an argument that this proposal-or any new proposal-will undermine the political parties because now there is so little left of them. But it strikes me that it is entirely possible that this single, six-year presidential term would constitute the final nail in the coffin of the party system. We would have a headless political party throughout the presidential term, and that, it seems to me, would have bad consequences. I think all of us on the panel would agree that there are problems in this, country caused by such factors as the weak condition of our political parties. But it seems to me that this proposal to limit the president's term to six years would further weaken political parties. MR. BARTLETI: I would like to suggest that the problems that we have in many ways stem from the strenuous exertions by the presidents of the last twenty years to get reelected. I am talking, first of all, of Vietnam. The record shows that troops were put in Vietnam in 1962 as a sort of holding operation, and they were kept there with the idea that maybe we would pull them out after 1964. I think that inflation started because Lyndon Johnson refused to raise taxes in 1966 when he was waging a war and ex panding spending in the social areas. I think that Watergate was, obviously, a result of Richard Nixon's exertions toward reelection. And it seems to me that Jimmy Carter portrays all the weakness of a man who has ideas that he doesn't dare put into effect because he has to keep happy two wings of a very badly divided party. I think that much of the Carter fumbling has stemmed from this reelection necessity. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I am very pleased that this discussion has clarified the extent to which those persons who support the limitation of terms desire to emancipate the legislators from the people. Senator Danforth complains that the congressmen have to go home too often. They spend too much time back in the districts. SENATOR DANFORTH: No, I did not say that. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: The Senate or the House does not meet on Fridays during this preelection year because everybody is back in the districts campaigning, worrying about reelection. I think that there is a very interesting point here. Popular control is guaranteed by the accountability of elected leaders and precisely by that marvelous way of harnessing ambition so that political power 11 seekers become responsive to the people through their hope of re election. That was, of course, the deliberate intention of those who engineered our Constitution. I think that it was a very wise intention, and that it has been very successful. I think also that the single, six-year term for the president is in teresting in that it would, in fact, empower a president for a very long time. Six years is a long time for a president to be independent of the people. It is quite the contrary of what John Adams suggested that frequent elections would remind the lawmakers of their close dependence on the people. It is useful to have this relationship be tween the close dependence on the people and the limitation of terms clarified in this fashion. SENATOR DANFORlH: I don't think that there is any connection at all between accountability and feverish electioneering. There is some conceptual difference between the two. I see among members the constant use of polling information to determine how they are doing, constant fear who the next opponent will be, constant concern that some interest group will watch a particular vote that affectsits interest and will base its campaign contributions on that vote. I don't think that has anything to do with accountability to the public. As a matter of fact, it tends to be accountability to a few segments of the public who are interested in particular bills and can give specific help in the next campaign. PROFESSOR BERNS: Senator, why would these things that you describe not also be relevant in the case of someone seeking officefor the first time? Wouldn't he .look to the polls? I won't ask you, Senator, whether you employed a polling orga nization when you ran for the Senate for the first time. Wouldn't a challenger be concerned with particular interests? What is the dif ference between the incumbent and the challenger on these scores? SENATOR DANFORlH: I think that the difference is in the self-percep tion of the person in public life as to what he is doing with his life. Does he see himself as somebody who has moved to Washington for good, has acquired a home, put his children in school, and will do anything to stay here? Or does he see himself as a person who sought the job with the intention of being in Washington for a limited period of time as a representative of the people who elected him but who will eventually return to those people? PROFESSOR BERNS: You have gained some rhetorical advantage here, and I want to take it away from you. 12 Let me pose the same question somewhat differently with respect to this man in Washington. Do you see yourself as a committed public servant, not, as you put it, as the man who will do anything to stay here, but as a man who, in the course of some time here, has gained experience with various factions, with congressional staff members, with the bureaucracy, with the White House, with everybody else in Washington and has thus acquired some insight into the way this system works? Do you see yourself as a man like Senator Henry Jackson, for example, who was able to understand all the implications of the SALT agreement much better, I think, than the average citizen of the state of Washington? Do you see yourself as that kind of man, and is that the kind of man we want? If this constitutional amendment had been adopted, I might add, Scoop Jackson would have been out of Washington a long time ago, and that would have been a national disaster. SENATOR DANFORTH: Like any other politician, I see myself as per fectly wonderful. [Laughter.] I certainly do my best in public office, do my best to serve the people of Missouri, and hope to be the best senator they've ever had. That is my goal. But I don't believe that it is a matter of a fine technical skill- PROFESSOR BERNS: No, I'm not saying that. SENATOR DANFORTH: -that is possessed only by a tiny fraction of the public. As pointed out earlier, I think that the main criteria are judg ment, good sense, and good will. MR. DALY: To read and listen to general comment nowadays, one would believe that the great malaise of the country is the basic attitude of take care of yourself and the devil take the hindmost. Do you see that limiting terms would tend to insulate public officials from the influenceof the special interest group, which has a very basic, narrow interest and not the general public interest in mind? PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I think that the special interest groups are us. We are all members of some special interest group: either we are truckers or we are mothers or we are members of the PT A or we are employees of nonprofit organizations or we are soldiers or we are oil men. I think that the notion of liberating lawmakers from the special interests is a most dangerous notion, which, when translated into action, in fact means liberating lawmakers from responsiveness and accountability to people. 13 MR. BARTLETI: I think Professor Kirkpatrick is taking rhetorical ad vantage there because it does not mean liberating anybody fromany thing. Whether one is the president, a senator, or a member of the House, in the kind of government we have, with these three evenly balanced branches and with the pressures of gaining public support in order to get anything done, one must deal with politics. No one in government will ever be liberated from politics because that is what governmentis. It is not a question of liberation. It is a question of lifting those in office out of the lowest level of politics, which is shaking hands over a fence instead of reading reports or pondering about the great decisions that need to be made. PROFESSOR BERNS: Why is that the lowest level of politics, Mr. Bartlett? MR. BARTLETI: Oh, I don't think it's an enormously- PROFESSOR BERNS: You said "shaking hands ovei; a fence," but that is seeking the suffrage of your constituents, the people. Why is that the lowest level? MR. BARTLETI: It's the ritual by which one is elected, and pressing the flesh is a very big part of it. I'm not here to knock it, but I do think that there are better ways for the president of the United States to use his time, particularly these days. SENATOR DANFOE,TH: Let me seize the rhetorical advantage. [Laugh ter.] I think the problem is that the parts are greater than the whole. That is to say that most of the public objects to the federal government as a whole-the bureaucracy, deficits, the regulation-but they ap prove of those aspects of government that are in their interest. Very few people, therefore, come to Washington or approach us as mem bers of the Congress to ask for less. They usually ask for more. A politician looking toward the next election will say yes, seriatim, to a host of different interest groups to aggregate at least 50 percent plus 1 of the vote. They parade through Washington wearing caps or blazers or buttons identifying their group and what they want from the government. While in general principle they would say no to government support of special interests, what they really mean is no for everybody else. I don't think that accumulating 51 percent of the vote through the support of interest groups is the same as ac countability or is the same as service to the public. 14 PROFESSOR BERNS: I'll repeat the question I asked earlier, Senator, because it seems to me to be as relevant now as it was then: Why won't the challenger do the same thing that the incumbent is doing? These interest groups, you say, besiege the incumbent, and through their support he aggregates 51 percent of the vote. If the challenger is to be successful, he, too, must aggregate support, and he, too, must make promises that would require increases in the budget. SENATOR DANFORTH: The answer is that it is not a search for perfec tion. It is a search for a relative improvement in the existing situation. The basic issue is how people seeking or holding public office perceive themselves. Do they perceive themselves to be people with a breadth of inter ests, with a lot of things they want to do with their lives, people with a home and another line of work they can always go to? Or instead, do they see themselves as full-time, professional politicians incapable of and uninterested in doing anything else, as people so overjoyed with being in public office that they can't imagine being anywhere else? The whole theory behind the idea of a constitutional amendment limiting terms is to build in a mechanism to informpeople when they seek and win office that serving in the government in Washington is not the be-all and end-all of life. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: But serving the government is a very good thing. I don't think we want to knock it. Isn't more of it what we need? We worry about cynicism and the decline of public spirit and the decline of a public philosophy. Serving the government is surely the cure for that. PROFESSOR BERNS: He wants to drive Winston Churchill out of politics; that's what he wants to do. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: Yes. SENATOR DANFORTH: No. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I'd like to go back to the 50 percent plus 1, as well as to Scoop Jackson. I never knew a politician, either running for office the first time or running for reelection, who would dream of trying to estimate what would be 50 percent plus 1 of his constitu ents and settling for that. 15 SENATOR DANFORTH: That mc,lkes it worse. PROFESSOR l MR. BARTLETT: But you just put your finger on the problem. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: What you call aggregating interests is what other people call building consensus, and the product of what you call government by interest groups some people call government by consent. MR. BARTLETT:I believe that the freshnesswe would get frombringing in people who have not made a career of government, particularly a career of elective office, would be an enormous enrichment of the government. It is quite clear now that the people who run congressional com mittees, who have been around for twenty-three years, have made their alliances and made them a way of life. They've learned how to operate, and they've learned how to survive, which is admirable. But if, in their place, people entered public office who felt they'd done enough in private life that they could now give twelve to twenty four years to the government, I think Congress would be entirely different, much more representative and much fresher. That is really my dream for this reform. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I'm afraidthis is the old dream that is based on an equation of innocence with virtue, isn't it? I findthat innocence can more accurately be equated with ignorance and usually leads not to creativity but to incompetence. MR. BARTLETT: Professor Kirkpatrick, I suggest that the people elected to the Senate very often intend to spend their entire lives there. They come forthirty-five or forty years. They are babes in arms when they come because they have never done anything except run for office. I would like to see more people in Congress who had done something else. 16 MR. DALY: I think we have opened this subject up very broadly, so we will start taking questions from the audience. AUSTIN RANNEY, American Enterprise Institute: I think everyone in the audience has greatly enjoyed comparing what we all know are the unsatisfactory circumstances of the present situation with Mr. Bartlett's and Senator Danforth's eager longing for the paradise that will come if we limit terms and the great fears that Professor Kirk patrick and Professor Berns have. It occurs to me that we might look at a few comparative facts rather than reasoning everything fromfirst principles. And it occurs to me, in that regard, that the one federal government agency where the members don't have to worry about reelection is the Supreme Court of the United States, though I'm not sure that that sets up a model I would like to see followed in every respect. Senator Danforth has had a good deal of experience in state gov ernment, as has Mr. Bartlett, through his research project Looking into this in detail, I find that the states produce very good laboratories in this regard. At present, twenty-one states allow their governors to be reelected as many times as the voters desire, and, presumably, these states are terribly governed. Twenty-four states restrict their governors to two four-year terms, or a total of eight years in office. But five states, Kentucky, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia prohibit their governors from succeeding themselves. They are limited not to one six-year term, but to one four-year term. Mr. Bartlett and Senator Danforth, will you please tell us to what degree and in what respects those five states are significantly better governed than the other forty-five states? MR. BARTLETI: My experience in the affairs of those states is very limited, so I can't really judge them, but I don't think the examples are comparable. I don't think that the role of a governor today is comparable, in any respect, to the role of the president. I think your analogy is weak. DR. RANNEY: You'd rather not answer the question? [Laughter.] MR. BARTLETI: I can't because I haven't lived in those states. I don't accept them as laboratory examples of what's going on in Washing ton. SENATOR DANFORTH: I don't know what's going on in the govern ments of any state except my own state of Missouri, and I couldn't 17 argue from one example. The state government of Missouri is per fectly terrible, and our governor has, by constitution, a possibility of only two terms. But I think that that has to do with the incompetence of the individual now in that officerather than with a general principle of limiting terms. RICHARD SMOLKA, American University: The representative branch of government in the United States gives us no examples, that I'm aware of, of limiting terms. Could the panel cite some examples of any democratic form of government that limits the rights of the cit izens to choose their representatives, and what that experience has been? MR. BARTLETT: The Mexican legislature is restrictedto one term, and the Mexican presidency is a single six-year term. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: One would be slow to cite the Mexican gov ernment, I think, as a model of anything one would desire to emulate. MR. BARTLETT: I'm not here to praise or to criticize the government of Mexico. Mr. Smolka asked for an example, we gave him one. RUSSELL CHAPIN, American Enterprise Institute: Senator Danforth, I read something you wrote maintaining that the constant pressure to spend for reelection has something to do with the shift of power from the states to the federal government. Would you like to clarify that for us, sir? SENATOR DANFORTH: One of the most successful tools available to people in elective officeis to purport to do great things for the public. I think there has been a growing tendency of people in the federal government to expand the power of the federal government relative to state and local governments and to the private sector. The typical campaign promise is a new program, a new agency, a new spending initiative. The basic approach in running a campaign, therefore, has been to say yes and very seldom to say no. The people who say no, the people who say the unpopular things, tend to lose. The response to all this is a constant expansion of the size, shape, and cost of the federal government. Since 1970, federal spending has increased 200 percent, and federal transfer payments, 400 percent. This is a direct reaction to this very expansive view of what the federal government is and what it does. 18 PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: That's very interesting, but during the same period there has been an even greater expansion of state, county, and municipal governments. These are the budgets that have grown most dramatically and the levels at which the number of government employees have grown most dramatically. So there must be some thing else operating besides simply the desire of federal officeholders to expand the power of federal government, something persuading publicly elected officials and non-publicly elected officials to expand the powers of government. I think one has to face that. SENATOR DANFORTH: Having spent eight years in state government, I think that those in state government increasingly view themselves as contractors for the federal government operating federal programs with federal dollars and abiding by and policing federal regulations, rather than as independent decision makers. This is a very serious problem. True, the number of personnel and the budgets of the state governments are expanding, but they are frequently spending federal dollars. The leverage of federal dollars on decisions that heretofore have been made at the state and local levels is tremendous. MR. BARTLETT: It is hard to argue that the elections don't have a very strong impact on federal spending because we are seeing it in the effort of the Carter White House to get the President renominated and reelected. At one point Jody Powell was asked about the grants that were passed out in Florida during the primary there, and he said that that is how presidents campaign. Action grants are being dispensed throughout the country to cities in states holding primaries. There is a certain amount of spending purely for the sake of stimulating enthusiasm. This is what happens in elections; it's a natural reaction on the part of politicians, and it's been going on so long that we now have, as Senator Danforth said, a large number of grant programs. PROFESSOR BERNS: This is the third time I've asked this question, and now I'm seeking a formulation that will be absolutely persuasive to everybody here. What does political science tell us with respect to the following question: Who, the incumbent or the man who chal lenges the incumbent, is more likely to make extravagant promises? My experience suggests that it is more likely that he who seeks the office will make the more extravagant promise, including a monetary promise. I think, for example, of the khaki election following World War I in Britain where the question involved reparations to be demanded 19 of the Germans. Those in public office had some knowledge of the possible limits of what might be exacted from the Germans, whereas those in the outside said, "We'll make them pay until the pips squeak." In that particular case it will be shown that Winston Church ill, in office, was aware of the possible limits and, therefore, made the most modest promises he could make compatible with his re election chances and sober sense and with respect to international fiscal policy. Those out of office saw no limit whatever. The question, I repeat again, is, What does political science tell us as to who is more likely to make the extravagant promises and, there fore, is responsible for this exaggerated behemoth in Washington, D.C., that we talk about? MR. BARTLETI: I think even the political scientists would have a prob lem weighing the promises of the incumbent against the weight of the promises of the challengers. I just don't think it can be done. But we do have a record of where the federal budget has gone since World War II. That is the record of incumbency, and I think it is rather impressive. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: We also have the experience of other coun tries. The AEI monograph Growth of Government in the West, by the late Warren Nutter, makes perfectly clear that government every where has grown in the postwar period. It has grown dramatically in all the western democracies and in all modern industrial nonde mocracies, that is, in dictatorships and autocracies of various kinds. Government spending has increased, government bureaucracies have grown, and the powers and scope of government decisions have, in fad, expanded. We are back to the question my colleague Walter Berns started with. The question is not whether the ills to which you allude exist but whether the remedies you propose would, in fact, constitute the remedies for which you hope. My guess is that, as has happened with many well-intentioned reforms in recent history, your remedies would create more ills than perhaps already exist. SENATOR DANFORTH: I think that the remedy is simply realism-re alism about government, what it is, what it can accomplish, and realism about oneself. I believe that, at this point in our history, we as a country have a chance to regain a sense of realism about government. People are beginning to understand that we are paying a price for all the prom ises and all the programs concocted in an effort to meet those prom- 20 ises, the price being inflation and interest rates of approximately 20 percent. Somehow we have to be more realistic and more restrained about what government can do. This particular constitutional amendment is not a quick cure. It is simply an effort to focus a degree of realism on the second part of the equation, the self-perception of the public officeholder and of the aspirant for public office. That's really all that's involved. Do public officeholders see themselves as people who must always serve in public office or as people who have other things to do with their lives? MR. BARTLETI: Evaluating the remedy of ProfessorKirkpatrick, I think it would be fair to look at the fact that the one-term presidency has been endorsed by almost every important president. I think Woodrow Wilson is the glaring exception. But other than Wilson, we really cannot name a president who has not taken the view that he could have performed his services better and in greater deference to the national interest if he had not had the necessity to go out and get reelected. PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I think virtually all presidents and most pol iticians-ofwhom I have a good deal higher regard, generally speak ing, than Senator Danforth does-would, in fact, like to be freed of the disciplines of accountability. They would like to be freed of the disciplines of submitting themselves and their performance to the judgment of the voters in the upcoming election. I think this is quite true. I don't at all doubt that President Carter, for example, or almost any other president in or out of office would like to think of himself as havirighad two more years free of the constraints of the interests, free of the constraints of responsiveness to the voters, simply to implement his vision of the public good. The problem is, of course, that the president's vision of the public good is not necessarily the only vision of the public good; it isn't necessarily even a good vision of the public good, and it isn't nec essarily that of a majority of voters. I don't think we want to let our presidents determine under what kind of restraints they will exercise power, or for what kind of terQ1s, and in what context. ROBERT GOLDWIN, American Enterprise Institute: I have been trying to imagine what it would be like if these proposals were adopted. If I assume that we now have a one-term, six-year presidency, and congressmen and senators limited to twelve years, that means these 21 electioneering, campaigning congressmen will have five elections to run in, where they will be influenced by the desire to be reelected. Only in the two years at the end, their last term, will they be free of constraints and able to be statesmen. That would be a reduction of their electioneering by one-sixth unless you mean to increase their terms to three years. Then they would have four terms, so one-fourth of their time would not be influenced by the necessity to be reelected. Half their time the senators would be concerned about being re elected, and half their time free to be statesmen. And the president, all this time, would be ignoring interests. I wonder what the fitwould be: most of the time, Congress would be concerned about reelection and therefore listening to the interests. The president, on the other hand, would be some strange kind of nonpolitical being trying to deal with Congress. It seems to me that an amendment limiting terms would have consequences far beyond anything you are contemplating in this dis cussion. MR. BARTLETI: I think you've drawn the thing out ad absurdum be cause, in the firstplace, the president of the United States, with one term, would not be oblivious to everything that was going on. He would have enormous concern for his place in history and for this country, of which he is a citizen; and he would be working just as hard as presidents are today, only he wouldn't be working with politicians trying to fabricate deals in their states. MR. GOLDWIN: That's right; but the Congress would be full of poli ticians. MR. BARTLETI: The people who hold the chairmanships in Congress would, at this point, be removed fromthe necessity of these alliances with the special interest groups, which are now so blatant they are painful to watch. I think we would liberate the members in leadership positions from this election pressure. So, it wouldn't be quite as bizarre as you make it sound. MR. GOLDWIN: Some things pain you more than they pain me. If I look at the list of senators and congressmen with longest service, it seems to me they are much superior to the ones who have shorter service. MR. BARTLETI: That's a pretty good generalization. I don't think we have time to go through the whole list. 22 MR. GoLDWIN: It's a great list. You ought to look at it. SENATOR DANFORTH: I would like to say some favorable things about those of us who are in our first term. I don't think we are so bad. I think that the basic point is very simple, and the basic point is this. At the end of the movie Patton, General Patton quotes the re minder the slave whispers to the conquering hero as he leads the victorious procession through the triumphal gate, Sic transit gloria mundi, "So goes the glory of the world." I think that is a very im portant message for people in political life, that public office, and all the trappings that tend to isolate and insulate it, will not last forever, and that officeholders are human beings with other interests and other concerns that they will return to. It seems to me that, from the standpoint of personal humility, that is very important. MR. GOLDWIN: I think that response and the example of General Patton show the excessive expectations you have of life and of public service. General Patton was a professional soldier. General Eisen hower was another. We all know about the trappings of military life, and we all know of the terrible dangers we are exposed to when people devote their lives to something like that, and all the perquisites that go with it. But it was General Patton and professionals like him who won the war for us. I wouldn't have wanted to serve under amateurs who had a twelve-year limit when my life was at stake, and I don't want legislators who don't have experience. I'm willing to put up with some of the dangers just as I would be willing to put up with dangers of having a man like General Patton who got carried away at times by the tremendous powers he had. WILLIAM MECKE, Foundation for the Study of Presidential and Congressional Terms: I'd like to approach this question from the opposite end. If we limit the terms of the president and of members of Congress, what will make the voter spend any less time choosing that person? If the voter knows that the president will be in office for sixyears and that he will not be accountable apart fromthe possibility of impeachment, what makes you think the voter will spend any less time choosing that person? PROFESSOR KIRKPATRICK: I think there is no question whether a voter would spend more time if he were voting for a president who would serve six years rather than a president who would serve four. I wish he would spend more time. I think six years is a very long time to 23 empower a president. If there were two presidents from each state, as there are two senators from each state, I wouldn't worry so much about letting them stay in office for six years without having them held accountable for their stewardship. But there is only one presi dent, and there is great power lodged in the office. Six years is, from my point of view, too long to vest power in him. In voting for an incumbent, voters are in a much better position to make well-informed decisions than when they are voting for a nonincumbent because they have much better grounds for judging the incumbent. They know much more about how he will behave in office, how carefully he will tend to the public business, how freely and with which interest groups he will consort, which interest groups he will, in fact, equate with the public interest and which he will call the private interests. A voter is in a position to know a great deal about an incumbent. That is one of the reasons I'm so much in favor of having incumbents stand for reelection. I would like to let voters make informed deci sions. MR. BARTLETI: Two points. First, the present system is thoroughly boring the American voter. As most of you know, we had a 54 percent turnout at the last presidential election. If the system is designed to elicit the participation of the citizen, it is failing. Second, Professor Kirkpatrick is very anxious to have incumbents run so the voters can judge their records. The fact is that in Congress today-and I think Senator Danforth will agree with me-the incum bent has an enormous advantage in his ability to influence his image with the voters. He sends out mailings, huge mailings with govern- . ment franks on them, and he has people on the government payroll canvass his district to keep constituents aware of the identity of the congressman. This is not an educational process for the voter. The public financesthe reelection campaigns of incumbents today, and does so to a merry tune. Congress now costs $1 billion a year. In the last twenty years congressional staffs, use of computers, tele phone privileges, and all means of communication have expanded tremendously, which makes it nearly possible for the House incum bent to ensure his or her reelection. SENATOR DANFORTH: That is a very good point. There is no doubt that an incumbent is a heavy favorite in seeking reelection. Since World War II, 93 percent of the members of Congress have sought reelection, and 93 percent have been reelected. 24 In 1978, 95 percent of the House members who sought reelection were reelected. In the Senate it was somewhat less, about 66 percent. So there is absolutely no doubt that an incumbent has a very sub stantial margin in his favor when he seeks reelection. MR. DALY: This concludes another public policy forum presented by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. 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Limiting Terms for the President and Congress offers a discussion of proposed amendments to the Constitution that would limit the president to a single six-year term and members of Congress to twelve years of service. This edited transcript of an AEI public policy forum covers such questions as: • Does our commitment to democracy require a frequent turnover in top government offices and representation by "citizen-legislators"? • Does a constitutionally imposed limitation of terms abridge the citizen's right to vote for whomever he pleases, as often as he pleases? • How would the proposals affect government performance? • Would mandatory retirement of government officials ensure a flow of new ideas into public policy, or would it simply bar from office those with the wisdom that may come from long service? • Would limited terms insulate public officials from the influence of special interest groups or isolate them from the public? • Would officials have more, or less, influence with other parts of government, such as the bureaucracy, if their terms were limited? These questions are addressed by a panel consisting of Charles Bartlett, syndicated columnist; Walter Berns, AEI resident scholar; John C. Danforth, U.S. senator (Republican, Missouri); and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, AEI resident scholar. John Charles Daly, former ABC News chief, serves as moderator. ISBN 0-8447-2183-2 � American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research � 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036