Give Congress a Fighting Chance: The Case for Four-Year House Terms
This is Part 2 of the Centercratic series on incumbency, term limits, and structural reform.
In 1789, the average member of the House of Representatives served roughly 30,000 constituents, met in session for a few months each year, and then went home to run the family farm. The two-year term made perfect sense for that world. Members could campaign at leisure between brief sessions. There was no fundraising to speak of. The job was, by design, a part-time civic duty.
That world disappeared a long time ago.
Today, each of the 435 House members serves approximately 761,000 constituents. Congress is in session nearly year-round. The workload has increased by orders of magnitude, from 118 measures in the 1st Congress to over 16,000 bills introduced in the 117th. And yet the term of office remains exactly what it was 237 years ago: two years.
The result is a Congress trapped in permanent campaign mode, where fundraising has replaced legislating as the primary activity of the day, and where the institution itself has become so dysfunctional that it now passes fewer laws than at any point in its modern history.[1]
It is time to change the term. And it is time to pair that change with the accountability measure that 87 percent of Americans already support: term limits.[2]
The Fundraising Treadmill
In 2013, the Huffington Post obtained a presentation that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had shown to incoming freshmen. It recommended that members spend four hours per day on fundraising calls and only two hours per day on committee and floor work combined.[3] Both parties instruct their members to plan for approximately 30 hours per week of fundraising. That is more than most Americans spend at a full-time job in a four-day workweek, and it is time spent not legislating, not studying policy, and not serving constituents.
In 2016, CBS News’ 60 Minutes took hidden cameras into the Republican call centers near the Capitol. Rep. David Jolly of Florida described being told on his first day that his “first responsibility” as a sitting member of Congress was to raise $18,000 per day. He called the party call centers “sweatshop phone booths that compromise the dignity of the office.”[4]
This is not anecdotal. A 2025 working paper from Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies found that fundraising has become the primary daily task of House members, and that a member’s success in meeting fundraising targets is a significant factor in receiving committee assignments, chairmanships, and floor time for their bills.[5] A 2023 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences went further, demonstrating that House members who engaged in more political grandstanding were electorally rewarded with higher vote shares, while their actual legislative effectiveness had no effect on whether voters reelected them.[6]
Read that again. Voters reward performance. They do not reward results. The two-year cycle has created a system where acting like you are fighting for your constituents is more valuable than actually delivering for them.
An Idea That Keeps Coming Back
The proposal to extend House terms to four years is not new, and it is not radical. The first constitutional amendment to do so was introduced in 1869 by Rep. Lewis Selye of New York. Since then, more than 200 similar proposals have been introduced in Congress.[7]
The most prominent came from President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his 1966 State of the Union address, Johnson urged Congress to pass a constitutional amendment extending the House term to four years. His words remain as relevant today as they were sixty years ago:
“The present 2-year term requires most Members of Congress to divert enormous energies to an almost constant process of campaigning, depriving this Nation of the fullest measure of both their skill and their wisdom. Today, too, the work of government is far more complex than in our early years, requiring more time to learn and more time to master the technical tasks of legislating.”
Source: 1966 State of the Union Address[8]
Johnson’s proposal never advanced to a vote. Neither did any of the 200+ proposals that preceded or followed it. And in the six decades since, every condition Johnson identified has gotten dramatically worse. Constituencies have grown from 490,000 to 761,000. Legislation has become exponentially more complex. Campaign costs have exploded into the tens of millions per race. The fundraising treadmill that Johnson warned about in 1966 has become a full-time occupation.
The Centercratic Proposal
The Centercratic Party proposes a constitutional amendment with three components:
First, extend the term of office for U.S. House members from two years to four years. This single change would cut the number of election cycles in half, free members to spend substantially more time on the legislative work they were elected to do, and reduce the relentless pressure to raise money every single day they are in Washington.
Second, hold House elections on an off-cycle from presidential elections. This is critical. Johnson proposed making House elections concurrent with presidential elections, which would have tied representatives to presidential coattails and eliminated the midterm check on executive power. The Centercratic proposal does the opposite. House elections would occur in their own dedicated cycle, which means representatives would have to run on their own record and their own merits. It also means that the decennial census and reapportionment would have time to take effect before the next House election in each decade. This is not an “off-cycle” election in the way we think about midterms today, where voter fatigue from the two-year grind suppresses turnout. This would be its own national event, a full congressional renewal every four years, with the drama and attention that comes with an entirely new Congress.
Third, cap total House service at five terms, or twenty years. This is where the Centercratic proposal parts company with every major term limits bill in recent history. The Cruz/Norman resolution currently before Congress would limit House members to just three two-year terms, a total of six years.[9] Scholars at the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have warned that such short caps would destroy institutional expertise, increase lobbyist influence, and produce inexperienced lawmakers who end up “crafting legislation as if they are testing spaghetti.” Twenty years is generous enough to allow members to develop genuine mastery of complex policy areas while still guaranteeing the regular turnover that the American people overwhelmingly support.
Why This Works
This proposal addresses the three structural failures that have driven Congress to its current state of irrelevance.
It breaks the permanent campaign cycle. With four-year terms, members would have at least two full years to focus on governing before the next election approaches. The amount of time consumed by fundraising would not disappear, but it would be concentrated rather than constant. Members would have room to study legislation, build coalitions, and develop the expertise that effective governance demands.
It preserves accountability while adding it where none currently exists. Critics will argue that less frequent elections mean less responsiveness to voters. But consider what “accountability” actually looks like today: between 1964 and 2022, House incumbents were reelected 93 percent of the time.[10] In 2022, the reelection rate was 94.5 percent. In many districts, primaries are cancelled because no one even files to challenge the incumbent. The current system provides the illusion of accountability without the substance. A 20-year term limit provides something the current system does not: a guaranteed endpoint.
It aligns the House with how virtually every other elected office in America already works. The President serves a four-year term. Forty-eight of 50 governors serve four-year terms.[11] Roughly half of all mayors and city council members serve four-year terms.[12] Most county executives serve four-year terms. The U.S. House of Representatives stands almost entirely alone among major American elected offices in requiring its members to face voters every two years. That structure made sense in 1789. It does not make sense in 2026.
The Path Forward
Changing the House term requires a constitutional amendment. That means either two-thirds of both chambers of Congress propose it (and three-fourths of state legislatures ratify it), or two-thirds of state legislatures call a convention to propose it directly. Neither path is easy. Every major term limits proposal in American history has failed, despite overwhelming public support.
But the Centercratic proposal has something that previous efforts did not: a genuine trade. Members of Congress have resisted term limits for over two centuries because those proposals asked them to give up something (their careers) while offering nothing in return. This proposal offers something real: longer terms, less fundraising pressure, and more time to do the job they were elected to do. In exchange, they accept a reasonable cap on total service. That is not a punishment. That is a bargain.
And for the American people, who have watched Congress decline from passing 900 laws per session in the 1950s to just 64 in 2025, the bargain is even simpler. We give our representatives the time and space to actually govern. In return, we get a Congress that legislates, a Congress that works, and a Congress that eventually, inevitably, welcomes new voices and new ideas.
A Huge Win for America
The Founders built the two-year term for a nation of three million people, governed by citizen legislators who served for a season and then went home. We are now a nation of 340 million, governed by a permanent political class that spends more time dialing for dollars than writing laws. The structure they designed was brilliant for its time. It has failed for ours.
Four-year terms paired with a 20-year cap would transform the incentive structure of the House of Representatives. Members would be rewarded for results instead of performance. Talented Americans who refuse to become full-time telemarketers might actually consider running for office again. And Congress, the institution that the Founders intended to be the most powerful branch of government, might finally have a chance to become relevant again.
This is not a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. A Democratic president proposed it in 1966. More than 200 bipartisan proposals have been introduced over 157 years. Eighty-seven percent of Americans support the term limits component. The only people who have stood in the way are the people who benefit from the current system.
It is time to give Congress a fighting chance. It is time to give America the legislature it deserves.
For our Friday Vision series at the Centercratic Party, each week we trace the arc from past to present to future: how the systems that once worked broke down, where the structural failures are driving today’s dysfunction, and what governance looks like when results matter more than partisanship. We are grounded in data, guided by Centercratic principles, and built on the belief that this country’s greatest chapter has not been written yet. The future is not predetermined. It is a choice.
Join us every Friday.
Footnotes
[1]Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Tables 6-1 and 6-2. Updated November 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/vital-statistics-on-congress/
[2]Pew Research Center, “How Americans View Proposals to Change the Political System,” September 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-proposals-to-change-the-political-system/
[3]HuffPost, “Call Time For Congress Shows How Fundraising Dominates Bleak Work Life,” January 8, 2013. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/call-time-congressional-fundraising_n_2427291
[4]CBS News/60 Minutes, “Dialing for Dollars,” April 24, 2016. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congress-becoming-telemarketers/
[5]Yale ISPS, Brandice Canes-Wrone, “Congressional Fundraising Dynamics,” February 2025. https://isps.yale.edu/sites/default/files/publication/2025/02/brandice_canes-wrone_working_paper_12.5.24.web_.pdf
[6]Ju Yeon Park, “Electoral rewards for political grandstanding,” PNAS, April 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151507/
[7]Congressional Research Service, “Proposals to Change the House Term of Office to Four Years,” July 2003. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RS21574.html
[8]LBJ 1966 State of the Union Address, Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/state-of-the-union-address-1966/
[9]Britannica, “Congressional Term Limits: Pros, Cons, Debate,” March 2026. https://www.britannica.com/procon/congressional-term-limits-debate
[11]National Governors Association, Governors’ Powers & Authority. https://www.nga.org/governors/powers-and-authority/
[12]National League of Cities, “Cities 101: Term Lengths and Limits.” https://www.nlc.org/resource/cities-101-term-lenths-and-limits/