Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Nitack

I just had an interesting constitutional question come up in my head. Can voters in one state impose term limits for congressional seats for that state?

Lemit and IN cover the legal status of State Legislatures imposing term limits on congresspeople well, I think. In short, they can’t.

Practically, however, voters in any US state have the power to effectively impose term limits of any length at any time simply by voting their congresspeople out of office. The political major parties – Democratic and Republican – can make this more difficult, by discouraging the opposition of in-office candidates in their primary elections, but not prevent it.

Usually, however, voters are disinclined from voting against senior congresspeople, because they are more effective than junior members at securing federal money and other resources for the people of the states they represent. Though some of this is due to their greater experience, much of it is codified in the rules of the two houses, which grant membership and chairmanship on the various House and Senate committees on the basis of seniority (number of years in office). Committees are important, because these same rules require legislation to be referred to and evaluated by them, and because access to many kinds of information is restricted to the members of certain committees.

As long as House and Senate rules favor seniority, I don’t think voters will be inclined to vote for new candidates for Congress over old, except in cases where the new is much more attractive to voters than the old, or the old the subject of some egregious scandal. The only situation where I can imagine these rules being substantially revised would be one in which majorities in one or both houses would benefit from the changes, such as situation where a majority are junior members.