Power Protects Itself. That Is Why It Must Be Limited.
This is the second article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. Yesterday’s article examined Principle 1: Safeguard Our Democratic System. Today, we examine the mechanism that gives that safeguard its teeth.
Principle 2: Impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.
In January 2026, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 85 years old and in her 38th year in Congress, announced she would not seek another term. Her longtime deputy, Representative Steny Hoyer, 86, made the same announcement. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 83, had already stepped down from leadership. Their departures were treated as historic. They were not treated as what they actually were: a reminder that American democracy had, for decades, built no systematic mechanism to ensure that any of them had to leave at all.1
This is the second article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The second principle is this: impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.2 It is, by a wide margin, the most broadly popular structural reform in American political life. It is also, by a similarly wide margin, the reform that both major parties have done the least to advance. The distance between what Americans want and what Congress is willing to do on this question is itself a case study in exactly the problem term limits are designed to solve.
What Term Limits Are Actually About
The case for term limits is sometimes reduced to a complaint about old politicians, and that framing does the argument a disservice. Term limits are not primarily about age. They are about power structures, accountability mechanisms, and the structural conditions that make democratic representation genuine rather than nominal.
The pillar framework that grounds this series identifies two primary scholarly pillars that this principle serves: Pillar 2 (Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability) and Pillar 5 (Responsible, Competitive Political Parties).3,4 Both pillars share a common concern: when power concentrates without structural check, it tends to serve those who hold it rather than those who are supposed to be served by it.
Guillermo O’Donnell’s research on what he termed “delegative democracies” documents precisely what happens when institutional checks on power grow weak. In these systems, elections are held but genuine horizontal accountability is absent. Elected leaders, even those initially chosen in legitimate elections, gradually govern unconstrained by the institutional checks that make their authority genuine rather than merely formal.3 Term limits are one of democracy’s most direct mechanisms for ensuring that the act of winning an election does not become a license to hold power indefinitely.
The Founders were not unanimous on this question. Jefferson favored rotation in office as a fundamental democratic principle. Hamilton was less certain. What the historical record makes clear is that the constitutional architecture they designed contained one deliberate term limit: the presidential two-term norm, later formalized in the 22nd Amendment. They did not extend that logic to the legislative branch, on the theory that voters would serve as the natural check.5 That theory has not performed as anticipated.
Why This Pillar Is Under Stress Right Now
The data on congressional tenure and incumbency redefine what “voter accountability” means in practice. As of January 2025, the average House member had served 8.6 years and the average Senator had served 11.2 years.6 The current Congress is the third-oldest in American history, with an average age of 58.9 years, which is more than 19 years older than the median American.1 Twenty-four members of Congress are 80 years of age or older, and of those, more than half have announced plans to seek re-election in 2026.1
Those numbers describe a static legislature. What drives them is the mechanics of incumbency advantage, which are not a function of popularity but of structural barriers to competition. According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, fewer than 4 percent of members of Congress who sought re-election in 2023 lost to a challenger.7 Incumbents enjoy compounding advantages that have nothing to do with performance: name recognition built over decades, established fundraising networks that outspend challengers by ratios that can reach 10 to 1, franking privileges and free travel that allow them to maintain constituent contact at taxpayer expense, and committee chairmanships that give long-tenured members leverage over legislation that newer members simply cannot match.8
The result is what political scientists call “careerism,” the phenomenon in which elected officials, rationally responding to the incentives of the system, devote increasing proportions of their time to securing their next election rather than governing. Research cited by the St. Mary’s University Law Journal found that the preoccupation with re-election can cause incumbents to devote up to half of a two-year House term to campaigning rather than legislating.8 This is not a character failure. It is a predictable output of a system without structural accountability mechanisms.
The downstream consequence is the legislative collapse documented in yesterday’s article in this series. Congress passed 64 bills into law in 2025, a 93 percent decline from the average of the 1950s, in a year when a single party controlled both chambers and the presidency.9 When legislators are primarily oriented toward re-election rather than governance, and when the seniority system rewards longevity over effectiveness, the capacity to build the governing coalitions necessary to legislate erodes. Gridlock is not a malfunction of this system. It is the system operating exactly as its incentive structure dictates.
It is also worth being precise about which party has failed here, because the honest answer is both. The Senate last held a floor vote on a constitutional term limits amendment in 1995, when it failed to reach the two-thirds threshold required for a constitutional amendment.5 In the 31 years since, neither party has brought the question back to the floor when in the majority. Republicans have introduced the Cruz-Norman resolution in each of the last five Congresses without advancing it to a vote.10 Democrats have not introduced a companion proposal at all. Both parties benefit from incumbency, and incumbency protects itself.
What the 45 Percent Are Saying
The polling on this question is among the most consistent in American political life. A January 2025 McLaughlin and Associates survey found that 83 percent of Americans support congressional term limits, including 85 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of independents, and 79 percent of Democrats.11 A Pew Research survey found even higher support at 87 percent nationally.12 The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which surveys registered voters after presenting them with the strongest arguments on both sides, found that 83 percent favor a constitutional amendment, and that support has remained steady since the first survey on this question in 2017.13
Among independent voters, the 45 percent of American adults who identify with neither major party, support for term limits has polled consistently above 84 percent across multiple methodologies and survey organizations.11,13 The issue cuts across every demographic division: age, income, geography, and education. The five values that the Independent Center identified as consistent priorities for unaffiliated voters are pragmatism over ideology, accountability to constituents rather than donors, structural reform of the rules that enable dysfunction, civic seriousness, and problem-solving that produces real outcomes. Each of those values maps directly onto the term limits argument.14 Term limits are not a left or right position. They are the position of a majority of every measurable political group in America.
The frustration that drives this support is specific. Seventy-five percent of Americans say they are frustrated with both parties.15 But the frustration around term limits is more pointed than general cynicism. It is the frustration of people who understand, even without the language of political science, that a system in which fewer than 4 percent of incumbents lose re-election is not a system in which elections function as the accountability mechanism they are supposed to be. Voters can feel the gap between the rhetoric of representation and the reality of an institution where the same names appear on ballots year after year, decade after decade, insulated by structural advantages that have nothing to do with performance. That gap is not apathy. It is a correct observation about a broken mechanism.
The Centercratic Position
The Centercratic Party’s second principle states the solution plainly: impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.2 In practical terms, this aligns with the most widely supported proposal currently before Congress. The Cruz-Norman constitutional amendment would limit House members to three terms (six years) and Senators to two terms (twelve years), and it carries the support of 151 current members of Congress across both parties. The Centercratic position is not defined by the specific numerical limits in any one bill but by the underlying principle: no person should treat a seat in Congress as a permanent possession.10,11
A legislature designed to represent the full breadth of American life should reflect that breadth in its composition. Sixteen states currently operate with term limits for their state legislators, covering roughly 28 percent of all state legislative seats. In 2026 alone, 219 state legislators across 11 chambers will be termed out, creating open seats, new candidates, and genuine competitive elections in districts that might otherwise be permanent incumbencies.16,17
The Centercratic position also holds that term limits must be understood as one structural reform among several rather than a complete solution in isolation. Term limits address entrenchment. They do not automatically address the donor influence, committee power structures, or seniority systems that currently reward longevity over effectiveness. A genuine accountability agenda would combine term limits with campaign finance transparency, independent redistricting commissions, and reforms to committee assignment processes that currently make a 30-year incumbent more powerful than a 6-year member regardless of the evidence of governance.
The argument against term limits deserves an honest answer. Critics note that term limits can shift power from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists who retain the institutional knowledge that term-limited members will lack.8 This is a real risk and the Centercratic position takes it seriously. The answer is not to abandon term limits but to couple them with reforms that rebuild nonpartisan institutional knowledge through a professional congressional research and support infrastructure that serves members without serving any party. The problem is not that institutional knowledge exists. It is that institutional knowledge currently flows through channels controlled by those who benefit from entrenchment.
What History Teaches About the Alternative
The United States has one term limit with a documented record: the two-term presidential norm, codified into law by the 22nd Amendment in 1951 after Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive elections. The amendment passed with broad bipartisan support. Its sponsors included both Democrats and Republicans who had watched power concentrate in a single executive for thirteen years and concluded that the Founders’ norm of voluntary retirement was insufficient structural protection against indefinite tenure.5
The presidential example is instructive in two directions. First, it demonstrates that term limits on high office are constitutionally achievable and politically durable. No serious movement to repeal the 22nd Amendment has emerged in 75 years. Second, it demonstrates that the voluntary norm of rotation requires structural enforcement to be reliable. Washington’s two-term precedent held from 1796 to 1940 because each president chose to honor it, not because any mechanism required them to. When circumstances changed, the norm yielded.
The congressional case is more instructive still. Robert Byrd of West Virginia served 51 years in the Senate. John Dingell of Michigan served 59 years in the House.18 These were not ineffective legislators. Both were by many measures consequential figures. But the system that produced their tenures also produced, as a structural output, institutions in which the accumulation of personal power became an end in itself, seniority determined influence regardless of merit, and the pathway to leadership ran through longevity rather than effectiveness. The citizens of West Virginia and Michigan had the theoretical ability to remove Byrd and Dingell. In practice, the structural advantages of incumbency made that accountability essentially nominal. The accountability mechanism that the Founders trusted had been captured by the very system it was supposed to check.
At the state level, the evidence from the 22 states that have implemented term limits is cautiously positive. Research consistently finds that term limits increase electoral competition and legislative turnover, reduce the dominance of seniority-based committee structures, and produce more diverse legislative bodies.19 The effects on legislative productivity are more mixed and depend heavily on whether complementary reforms to staff and research infrastructure accompany the limits. That finding reinforces exactly why the Centercratic position frames term limits as one component of a broader accountability agenda rather than a stand-alone cure.19
Time-Limited by Design
The path to congressional term limits runs through the Constitution, and constitutional amendments are deliberately difficult. The Cruz-Norman resolution would require two-thirds of both chambers of Congress to send it to the states, and then ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures (38 of 50) to become law.10 An alternative route under Article V of the Constitution allows 34 state legislatures to call a convention limited to this single subject, bypassing Congress entirely. As of early 2026, 13 states have passed the U.S. Term Limits organization’s single-subject application for that convention, with active resolutions pending in at least 15 additional states.20
What the Centercratic Party asks of the 45 percent, the politically independent majority who support term limits by a margin that dwarfs support for any other structural reform in American politics, is to treat this as a project rather than a wish. The polling is not the obstacle. The will of the American people on this question has been clear and consistent for more than a decade. The obstacle is that the people who would have to vote for this reform are the people who benefit most from its absence. That conflict of interest is not a reason to abandon the project. It is the most precise possible description of why the project is necessary.
A legislature that cannot impose term limits on itself is a legislature that has, at least on this question, placed institutional self-preservation above the democratic accountability it exists to provide. That is, in the most fundamental sense, exactly what this principle was designed to prevent.
Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 3: Protect Election Integrity, and why the question of who counts the votes is inseparable from the question of whether elections are genuine.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 NBC News. “24 Members of Congress Are 80 or Older. More Than Half Are Running for Re-election.” January 15, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-oldest-members-run-reelection-80s-rcna249479
2 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
3 Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: O’Donnell, Guillermo. “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies.” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 3 (July 1998): 112-126; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers, Nos. 47-51.
4 Chapman, Paul J. “What’s the True Foundation of All Democracies?” Foundations, Centercratic Party, 2026.
5 Foreign Policy Journal. “Why Are There No Term Limits for Congress: Court Ruling and Incumbency Advantage.” March 24, 2026. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2026/03/25/why-are-there-no-term-limits-for-congress/
6 Congressional Research Service. “Service Tenure and Patterns of Member Service, 1789-2025.” January 21, 2025. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2025-01-22_R41545
7 Everything Policy. “Would Term Limits Impact Congressional Careers?” October 1, 2025. https://www.everythingpolicy.org/policy-briefs/would-term-limits-impact-congressional-careers
8 St. Mary’s University Law Journal. “Congressional Reform: Can Term Limitations Close the Door on Careerism?” https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol24/iss4/13/
9 Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america
10 Cruz, Ted, and Ralph Norman. Senate Joint Resolution 1 / House Joint Resolution 12, 119th Congress. January 7, 2025. https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz-rep-norman-colleagues-introduce-constitutional-amendment-to-impose-term-limits
11 U.S. Term Limits / McLaughlin and Associates. “New Poll: 83% of Americans Support Term Limits for Congress.” February 10, 2025. https://termlimits.com/new-poll-83-of-americans-support-term-limits-for-congress/
12 Pew Research Center / KPQ Radio. “Term Limits for Congress is Easier Said Than Done.” October 15, 2025. https://kpq.com/public-support-term-limits/
13 Program for Public Consultation, University of Maryland. “Five-in-Six Americans Favor Constitutional Amendment on Term Limits.” March 20, 2023. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/congressional-term-limits/
14 Independent Center. “Why More Americans Are Choosing to Stay Politically Independent in 2026.” April 5, 2026. https://www.independentcenter.org/articles/why-more-americans-are-choosing-to-stay-politically-independent-in-2026
15 Chapman, Paul J. The Centercratic Party Business Case. Centercratic Party, February 2, 2026.
16 Ballotpedia. “Impact of Term Limits on State Representative Elections in 2026.” https://ballotpedia.org/Impact_of_term_limits_on_state_representative_elections_in_2026
17 Everything Policy. “Term Limits and Legislative Productivity.” November 19, 2025. https://www.everythingpolicy.org/policy-briefs/term-limits-and-legislative-productivity
18 Wikipedia. “List of Longest-Serving Members of the United States Congress.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-serving_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
19 U.S. Term Limits. “The Fix for Entrenched Incumbents Who Dominate Congress.” November 19, 2025. https://termlimits.com/the-fix-for-entrenched-incumbents-who-dominate-congress/
20 U.S. Term Limits. “Term Limits Convention Progress.” Updated March 2026. https://termlimits.com/progress/