ELECTIONS : Term Limit Campaign Rides High on Wave of Anti-Incumbency : Grumbling over Congress is sounding like a roar for restrictions. Many challengers pledge to back amendment.

With anti-incumbent politics at a fever pitch this year, supporters of fixed terms for members of Congress believe next month’s midterm elections could give them virtually unstoppable momentum at a pivotal point in their movement’s history.

Prodded by polls indicating overwhelming support for term limits, congressional challengers across the country are taking up the movement’s mantra, pledging to support a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms they can serve in Washington.

In addition, voters in six states will decide the fate of term-limit ballot initiatives. If the measures are approved, and it appears most will be, those states will join the 16 that already have imposed fixed ceilings on congressional terms.

“Challengers running this year are overwhelmingly using term limits . . . and it’s going to be an issue in a lot of races,” says Paul Jacob, executive director of U.S. Term Limits, a national advocacy group.

Opponents agree. “The public thinks they’re a great idea, a wonderful way of punishing politicians,” says congressional scholar Thomas Mann, who calls term limits one of the “most horrendous ideas to come down the pike in the past 200 years.”

A second crucial test of the movement’s viability will come after the election, when the Supreme Court reviews the constitutionality of term limits. So far, courts have tended to uphold term limits for local offices but have struck down those imposed on Congress.

The implications are enormous. A court decision in favor of term limits would turn many veteran lawmakers out of office, making congressional races more competitive by guaranteeing more open-seat contests.

More fundamentally, term limits would profoundly alter the character of Congress by upending the seniority system that has long served as the principal law of political physics governing the way Capitol Hill works.

The court’s decision will affect restrictions already approved by voters in California and 15 other states, as well as initiatives on the ballot this year in Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Nevada. (Voters in Colorado and Utah, which previously passed limits restricting their representatives to six two-year terms in the House, will consider initiatives this year that would cut that to three terms.)

Opponents are pinning their hopes on a court rejection instead of a political reversal for one simple reason: Everywhere that the issue has been put to the electorate so far, term limits have passed.

The pending court case figures prominently in the efforts by supporters to elect pro-limit candidates and secure passage of the ballot measures next month. An overwhelming voter endorsement of limits could help convince the Supreme Court that the movement truly represents the will of the people, they contend.

So far, they have had little difficulty persuading congressional candidates to take up the cause. At last count, 211 candidates in this year’s races had signed U.S. Term Limits’ “voter contract,” pledging to support a constitutional amendment limiting them to three two-year terms in the House or two six-year terms in the Senate. Not surprisingly, all but 27 are challengers, although 160 Republican incumbents are promising to bring a term limit amendment to a floor vote if they take control of the House next year.

Jacob claims his group played a role in last month’s Oklahoma primary, in which veteran Democratic incumbent Rep. Mike Synar lost. He says U.S. Term Limits plans to mount “voter education” campaigns in other key races where the outcome looks tight and the candidates have taken opposing positions on limits.

Another group, Illinois-based Americans for Limited Terms, has jumped into one of the most high-profile races of the year, announcing it will spend at least $300,000 on television advertising in Washington state’s 5th Congressional District. The race pits Democratic House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, an outspoken term limit opponent who is running for a 16th term, against political newcomer George Nethercutt.

Like other term-limit advocates, Robert Costello and Paul Farago--the group’s founders--strongly deny that their motives are partisan. They insist their only aim is to educate voters on where candidates stand on term limits.

Some analysts are skeptical, noting that the advertising in Washington has had the effect of supporting Nethercutt’s campaign. Costello and Farago, at a recent news conference called to preview their TV commercial in the race, refused to disclose their contributors or reveal the names of the political consultants advising them. Their press conference was organized by the same consulting firm that handled public relations for conservative Republican Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential bid.

Other key Democratic incumbents targeted by term-limit advocates include Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks of Texas, Reps. Peter Hoagland of Nebraska, Neal Smith of Iowa, Bob Carr of Michigan and Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, who is running for the Senate seat of retiring Democrat David L. Boren.

Whether term limits will be a decisive factor in any of these races is subject to considerable debate.

Opinion polls show that voters tend to endorse term limits by margins of 70% or more, a level that appears to reflect the wave of anti-incumbent fervor rolling across the nation. But if that anger sweeps many incumbents from office this year, some analysts believe enthusiasm for term limits might ebb.

“We already have term limits, and they’re called elections,” says Becky Cain, president of the League of Women Voters. “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to turn people out of office.”

Moreover, some analysts think that term-limit initiatives might actually protect some incumbents by serving--much as Ross Perot’s third party candidacy did in 1992--as a lightning rod for anger that might otherwise be directed at politicians. In 1992, for instance, Ohio voters adopted a term-limit initiative but made John Glenn their first senator ever to win reelection for a fourth six-year term.

“There is no question that people overwhelmingly favor term limits, just as there is no question that they also overwhelmingly favor their right to vote for whomever they want,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. He views the seeming contradiction as symptomatic of a deep but inchoate “anger and mistrust that people have of government nowadays.”

This confusion makes it hard to gauge the influence of the term-limit debate in individual races.

In Washington, Foley is swimming against a current of anti-Congress sentiment that has swept up voters “who think they are empowered as no one else to send a message to Congress this year,” Mellman says. At the same time, there is little evidence that term limits themselves are an issue in his campaign. “They don’t come up in our focus groups,” says Mellman, who handles opinion surveys for Foley.

The Supreme Court’s decision will turn in part on whether states are free to amend the only three qualifications the Constitution stipulates for federal office: age, residency and citizenship. Opponents say the list is not amendable; supporters argue that the framers never said it was exclusive.

But the arguments go far beyond that narrow, if profound, question. On one point both sides agree: Term limits would radically alter the character of Congress, dismantling the seniority apparatus and sounding the death knell for that seemingly reviled creature of the current system, the career politician.

To supporters, whose arguments resonate with nostalgia for a simpler time when politics seemed more noble, term limits mean a return to the era of “citizen lawmakers” who came to Washington out of civic duty, discharged it and then returned to private life to live by the laws they passed while in Congress.

To opponents such as Cain, however, term limits represent a dangerously simplistic solution that will deprive Congress of the expertise to deal with complex issues that lawmakers learn only over years of service. The present system may need surgery, but with a scalpel and “not the meat ax approach to public policy” that term limits represent, she says.

Taking heart from the fact that the public clearly disagrees, term-limit proponents confidently predict that support for their movement will grow regardless of how the elections turn out or how the high court decides the issue.

“We’ll win in the end,” says Jacob, because “Americans now believe that to make Congress work again we have to change the whole system . . . not just who serves in it.”

Battling to Limit Terms

Supporters of fixed terms for members of Congress are hoping a victory in next month’s midterm elections. A big win would give the movement a tremendous boost in the bitter debate over term limits.

Source: U.S. Term Limits