The measure would have limited members of both houses of Congress to 12 years of service - six two-year terms for House members and two six-year terms for senators.
Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., a nine-term congressman and the main sponsor of the bill, said it was needed to end "the tendency of too many of our members to vote for every special interest that comes along because they want to be re-elected."
But Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., a 12-term member of the House and one of its most respected members, argued that term limits would unfairly restrict the right of the voters to elect whomever they wanted. "This may be the end of term limits," he said after the vote, placing his palms together as if praying while gazing toward the ceiling.
Term limits were part of the Republican's "Contract With America," which helped them win control of Congress in the 1994 elections. But the Contract has faded as a GOP program blueprint since last November's elections.
Moreover, the Senate was never as supportive of term limits as the House and is unlikely to resurrect the issue. In the last Congress the Senate never voted on it directly, but defeated a non-binding resolution putting senators on record favoring term limits. A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said there was no indication that the Senate would consider term limits again.
We hope Hyde is right about the end of term limits. It's a poorly conceived idea, and an unnecessary one. Opponents point to the rapid turnover in House membership in recent elections through attrition without a term-limits amendment.
The right way to limit legislators' terms is to vote the undesirable ones out of office. It makes no sense to force outstanding legislators to leave because they have reached an arbitrary limit. Does Hawaii want Daniel Inouye to be forced to leave the Senate?
In addition, term limits are undemocratic. They restrict the voters' choice of candidates. They imply that the voters can't be trusted to choose their representatives wisely. The nation already has term limits without amending the Constitution. They're called elections.
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