@) 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. Council of Academic Advisers Paul W. McCracken, Chairman, Edmund Ezra Day University Professor of Busi­ ness Administration, University of Michigan Robert H. Bork, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law, Yale Law Scl10ol Kenneth W. Dam, Harold ]. and Marion F. 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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.