The term limits movement is a political movement which arose in the early 1990s with the avowed intent of limiting members of state legislatures and Congress to a fixed maximum time of service in a given body, after which they would no longer be eligible for reelection. By 1995, 23 states had enacted measures limiting terms for their members of Congress, and still more had limited terms of state legislators. However, on May 27, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all laws limiting terms for Congress, ruling that congressional terms could only be limited by a Constitutional amendment ("Supreme Court," 1995, p. 1480). Term limit laws applying to state legislatures were not affected by this ruling.
Popular support for term limits has been part of a broader discontent with the political process, a discontent which also found expression for example in Ross Perot's third-party bid for the White House in 1992. However, the term limits movement was also seized upon by Republican strategists who saw it as a means to break what they perceived as a Democratic lock on Congress, and particularly the House of Representatives. Thus, a federal term-limits law was one of the proposed measures offered in the House Republican "Contract with America" during the 1994 elections ("Signed, sealed and delivered," 1995, p. 11).
Ironically, the 1994 election gave the Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. This at once undermined both GOP enthusiasm for term limits ("Term limits," 1995, p. 1005) and the philosophical argument that term limits were needed to reduce the advantages of incumbency. The results of the 1994 election and the Supreme Court decision have thus both reduced the momentum for term limits on the national level, but term limit laws are in force in many states, and it is far too early to say that the national term limits movement is politically dead.
The arguments in favor of term limits beg...