Restoration

By George F. Will

From Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will, whose “thinking is stimulating, erudite, and makes for great reading” (The Boston Globe) comes a “biting, humorous, and perceptive” (The New York Times Book Review) argument for the necessity of term limits in Congress.

The world’s oldest democracy—ours—has an old tradition of skepticism about government. However, the degree of dismay about government today is perhaps unprecedented in our history. Americans are particularly convinced that Congress has become irresponsible, either unwilling or incapable of addressing the nation’s problems—while it spends its time and our money on extending its members’ careers. Many Americans have come to believe fundamental reform is needed, specifically limits on the number of terms legislators can serve.

In Restoration, George Will makes a compelling case, drawn from our history and his close observance of Congress, that term limits are now necessary to revive the traditional values of classical republican government, to achieve the Founders’ goal of deliberative democracy, and to restore Congress to competence and its rightful dignity as the First Branch of government. At stake, Will says, is the vitality of America’s great promise self-government under representative institutions. At issue is the meaning of representation. The morality of representative government, Will argues, does not merely permit, it requires representatives to exercise independent judgment rather than merely execute instructions given by constituents. However, careerism, which is a consequence of the professionalization of politics, has made legislators servile and has made the national legislature incapable of rational, responsible behavior. Term limits would restore the constitutional space intended by the Founders, the healthy distance between the electors and the elected that is necessary for genuine deliberation about the public interest.

Blending the political philosophy of the Founders with alarming facts about the behavior of legislative careerists, Restoration demonstrates how term limits, by altering the motives of legislators, can narrow the gap between the theory and the practice of American democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Press
• Release date: May 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781439119044

George F. Will

George F. Will's column appears in more than four hundred newspapers nationwide. His work also appears biweekly in Newsweek. Will is a commentator for ABC News and the author of twelve books in addition to Men at Work. He was educated at Trinity College in Connecticut, Oxford University, and Princeton University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Book preview

Restoration

CONGRESS, TERM LIMITS AND THE RECOVERY OF DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

GEORGE F. WILL

The Free Press

A Division of Macmillan, Inc.

NewYork

Reviewers’ Praise for

RESTORATION

Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy by George F. Will

"George F. Will, who is among the most literate and lively of the conservative commentators, has taken his pen to the cause of term limits…. Restoration … is a biting, humorous and … perceptive sifting of much of the sand that fouls the national political machinery…. Mr. Will has accurately charted the fault lines in the national political terrain."

—Joseph A. Califano, Jr., The New York Times Book Review

Among political journalists in the United States today, Will is perhaps the only true political philosopher. He takes the subject of term limits to a level well beyond that generally treated in the press. His closely reasoned arguments ought to stir up new thinking….

—James H. Andrews, The Christian Science Monitor

"Restoration weaves its way elegantly from Madison’s Federalist essays to current scholarship about why today’s careerist Congress behaves as it does. Mr. Will’s most valuable contribution is to elevate the case for term limits above mere Congress-bashing."

—Paul A. Gigot, The Wall Street Journal

With the end of the cold war, Americans can at last … widen the sphere of public debate, free (we might hope) of the political and ideological constraints of the past forty years. George Will … has contributed to that debate with the strongest case for term limits yet.

—Sean Wilentz, The New Republic

Timely, thoughtful argument….

—Forbes Magazine

As always, George Will’s thinking is stimulating, erudite and makes for great reading….

—David Mehegan, Boston Globe

George Will … is for one thing a surpassingly brilliant polemicist, and the sheer artistry of his work should command attention and respect. … I proffer here a salute to a consummate stylist and a profoundly informed doctor of civil order.

—William F. Buckley, Jr., The National Review

George Will has done America a favor by taking seriously the issue of representational government. His new book, Restoration, is an effort to re-invigorate civic-mindedness and to stem what he sees as a rising tide of cynicism toward Washington.

—Larry Bush, San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner

"George Will is … probably the most perceptive observer of the American political condition that we have today. His new book, Restoration, argues for limiting the terms of the politicians we send to Washington. And he wins the argument, hands down."

—Lee Iacocca, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

"Restoration (is) the smartest and most important book on Congress in many years."

—James K. Glassman, Roll Call

Regardless of your political persuasion, conservative columnist George Will is always a delight. Nowhere in modern American letters can you find a writer with a better grasp of the relationship between our social fabric and the government which reflects and creates it. In Restoration, marshaling evidence and argument in support of congressional term limits, Will’s narrative power and facility with statistics have never been more polished.

—William C. Kellough, Tulsa World

Elegant and nuanced arguments….

—Mell Small, Detroit Free Press

Luminously and wittily phrased….

—Edwin M. Yoder, Houston Chronicle

Penetrating … political analysis at its best, not unlike those Federalist papers Will so much admires.

—John Mort, American Library Association Booklist

Copyright © 1992, 1993 by George F. Will

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

The Free Press

A Division of Macmillan, Inc.

866 Third Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022

www.simonspeakers.com

Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.

1200 Eglinton Avenue East

Suite 200

Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1

Macmillan, Inc. is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

First Free Press Paperback Edition 1993

Printed in the United States of America

printing number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Designed by REM Studio, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Will, George F.

Restoration : Congress, term limits and the recovery of deliberative democracy / George F. Will.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-02-934713-0

ISBN 978-0-0293-4713-3

eISBN 978-1-4391-1904-4

1. United States.  Congress—Terms of office.  I. Title.

JK1140.W55   1992

328.73′O73—dc20   92-26005

CIP

To Pat and Liz Moynihan and Jack and Sally Danforth

Were more of the people who came to Washington like these four, this book would not have been written.

ALSO BY GEORGE F. WILL

The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts

The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions

Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does

The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986

The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election

Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball

Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and At Home 1986-1990

… yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency …

—ALEXANDER HAMILTON Federalist No. 68

Contents

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1.

From Bristol to Cobb County: The Decline of Representation and the Rise of Careerism

CHAPTER 2.

The Recovery of Deliberative Democracy

CHAPTER 3.

The Revival of Classical Republicanism

CHAPTER 4.

Like a Strong Wind: Love of Country and Respect for Congress

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Preface to the Paperback Edition

In the waning days of the Bush administration—and, my, how they did wane—the air in Washington was thick with talk about the problem of gridlock. In that still-recent past, when this book was published, the word gridlock was understood to mean the restraint on government action resulting from control of the two political branches by different parties.

As this preface is written, in the instructive first year of the Clinton administration, the new President is frequently out of sorts and out and about, emphatically decrying the problem of … gridlock. This, in spite of the fact that of the 537 people who are in Washington because they won an election, 316 are Democrats, who control both the legislative and executive branches.

The partisan alignment in Washington has changed, yet again. But the sense, in Washington and out in the country, that something is seriously wrong with our governance has not changed, other than to deepen. This confirms a conclusion I came to before writing this book. It is the conclusion that impelled me to write the book. It is that the fundamental ailment of American politics is not a function of partisanship—not any ideological difference between Democrats and Republicans. Rather, the problem is rooted in the nature of the contemporary political class, regardless of party. That class exploits the modern state to make incumbency almost unassailable.

The 1992 elections came hot on the heels of the House banking scandal (you remember: the check kiting), and amidst a crescendo of disgust with the conduct of government generally. Those elections were supposed to produce a purge of incumbents. But when the dust settled on election night, in the House of Representatives there stood 93 percent of the incumbents, still incumbents. This outcome was not unusual. Since 1984, the reelection rate for the House has been above 95 percent.

True, the electorate’s dyspeptic mood, and the many embarrassments in Congress, did produce before the 1992 elections a large number of retirements, and hence an unusually large freshman class in the House in 1993. Did those freshmen turn out to be agents of change? Hardly. Instead, they fit a familiar pattern. Almost seventy-two percent of the new House members were old politicians, careerists coming to Congress from other elective offices.

To be fair, when the House Democrats caucused in January, 1993, there was some change. Rep. Jamie Whitten, 82, the Mississippi Democrat who was first elected one month before Pearl Harbor, and who by 1993 was almost incapacitated by various ailments of age, was replaced as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. His replacement? Kentucky Democrat, William Natcher, age 83.

I believe that the voting for president was only the 15th most important voting done on November 3, 1992. On that day, two months after this book was published, term limits were voted on in referenda in 14 states where the political class had been unable—although not for want of trying—to prevent people from voting on limits. In all 14 states, limits won. In 13 of the 14 states, on a per state basis, limits got more votes than Bill Clinton got. (The only place he ran ahead of term limits was Arkansas.) In the 14 states term limits got more votes than Ross Perot got in 50 states.

By now 15 states, with 30 percent of all Senate seats and 36 percent of all House seats, have voted for term limits. That is, 186 of the 535 members of the U.S. House and Senate are serving under state-imposed term limits. Various career politicians, such as House Speaker Tom Foley (who came to Congress when an Oldsmobile cost $3,495 in 1964), are challenging the constitutionality of state-imposed limits. They are arguing (as is discussed in Chapter 4) that limits for federal legislators can only be imposed by constitutional amendment. Of course Foley and his friends, who run the House with an iron fist in an iron glove, will not let such amendments even come to the floor for debate, let alone go to the states for ratification debates. Such amendments are strangled in the House Judiciary Committee. It is chaired by Texas Democrat Jack Brooks, who was first elected when Arthur Godfrey was a radio star and the Braves (later of Milwaukee, and now of Atlanta) played baseball in Boston, in 1952. In the Senate, where it is harder to stifle a minority, term limit proposals are at least getting voted on, and are gaining. In a 1947 test they got one vote; in 1991 they got 30; in 1993,39.

The question of the constitutionality of state-imposed term limits will be settled by the Supreme Court. But no matter what the Court says, the drive for limits, either through state-by-state victories or through a constitutional amendment, will continue.

The issue of term limits will be settled, as it should be, in political debate and democratic processes. So, for the foreseeable future, and probably for most of this decade, term limitations will continue to be the energizing goal of the most important and broad-based grass roots movement in the nation. Polls continue to show that more than 70 percent of the nation—large majorities in both parties and all regions—favor limits.

The importance of the term limits movement is two-fold. It touches the deepest issues of political philosophy, and particularly those of democratic theory. Furthermore, it has enormous potential for institutional and moral change—a judgment with which opponents of term limits agree.

I hope and expect that by the end of this decade this volume will be an artifact of largely historical interest, like a Union Army mini ball unearthed from a Civil War battlefield—a spent bullet from a long struggle finally won. But no matter which side wins, supporters and opponents of term limits should be able to agree that the argument, by quickening our sense of many large issues of democratic practice, has been good for us and our nation.

Introduction

On May 12, 1780, when the British siege of Charleston, South Carolina, succeeded and the town surrendered, American officers were at first permitted to keep their swords. However, the swords were soon demanded by British commanders who were annoyed by the Americans’ defiant shouts of long live Congress!¹ Times have changed.

It has been some time since Americans felt an overmastering urge to shout their enthusiasm for Congress. But it also has been quite a spell since Americans so nearly unanimously spoke as disrespectfully of Congress as they do in this, the first decade of the Constitution’s third century. Times have changed. America’s first two Congresses—the First and Second Continental Congresses of 1774 and 1775—were at best extralegal. They existed in defiance of, and were working to dissolve, the duly constituted authority in British North America, authority that emanated from Westminster in London. It is of course natural, and not alarming, that Congress does not now, in the 1990s, have a place in the affections of a secure and mature nation comparable to the place Congress occupied in 1780. Then the Congress was the sole focus of authority for, and the sole focus of patriotism in, an embryonic nation struggling to be born. Furthermore, nothing is more natural in a nation with America’s intellectual pedigree than that Congress should come to be thought of, at best, ambivalently. Encoded in Americans’ civic chromosomes, in their political DNA, is a deep—literally, congenital—suspicion of all government, and especially of that government that is most distant from them.

To be a politician in a democracy, and especially in the rough-and-tumble of American democracy, is to seek elevation while denying any desire to be special. Americans are always eager to reassure their politicians that no politician is immoderately reverenced. Making jokes at Congress’s expense was an American tradition long before Mark Twain made his celebrated jape that America has no indigenous criminal class—other than Congress. Twain also said, suppose I am a crook; and suppose I am a congressman; but I repeat myself. For as long as there has been that distinct creature, the American, he has considered it good democratic fun to level the political people by leveling at them the guns of jest and disrespect.

But by the beginning of the 1990s the nation’s jokes had an ugly bite, and the laughter had a bitter timbre. The condition of Congress, in its own estimation as well as that of its constituents, was worse than ever before. Opinion polls should be taken with no more than two grains of salt, but by the summer of 1992 some poll results were too extreme to ignore. To take but one example, an Associated Press poll found that just I percent of Americans (a sliver smaller than the poll’s margin of error) said that they trusted Congress to do what is right just about all the time. Now, that was, perhaps, a foolish formulation for a question, one designed to generate a memorable number. But a more revealing number from the same poll was that approximately one-third of the sample said they would almost never trust Congress to do the right thing.

By the beginning of the 1990s it was beginning to seem that Congress was not just going through another of its bad patches. Rather, Congress seemed to have settled into a deep trough, and it lacked the strength to lift itself out. More and more people, including many despairing—and departing—members of Congress, were convinced that this was not a mere bad patch to be got through, it was the future. Or it would be, unless something drastic were done. This book is written to give the rationale for one remedial measure, a limitation on the number of consecutive terms that members of legislatures can serve.

I have come slowly and reluctantly but firmly to acceptance of the need for this reform. My reflex is to recoil from proposals for constitutional change. However, under the accumulating weight of evidence I, like millions of other Americans, have been driven to the conclusion that something must be done to restore Congress to competence and respect, and that term limits can do it.

Americans today favor term limits by substantial margins. In every region and every demographic group, there is a substantial majority for term limits. This majority may have, as yet, only a shallow commitment to a reform that is only superficially understood. However, the more deeply Americans understand the philosophical justifications for term limits, and the probable consequences of limits, the more intense the support for limits should become. One lesson of American history is that when a majority of Americans have a strong and protracted desire for something, they get it. This book is an attempt to nourish the intensity and staying power of the desire for term limits. My aim is to help transform this desire from a lightly held preference into a deeply felt, because fully comprehended, conviction.

My passage from opposition to mere skepticism, through quickened interest, and on to conviction, was the result of revisiting some of the ideas and controversies that shaped America in the founding era, when the Republic was wax soft to the touch of strong, sharp thinking. That thinking concerned such ideas as deliberative democracy and classical republicanism.

Term limits were included among the fifteen resolutions of the Virginia Plan submitted to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. But term limits were put aside and characterized as entering too much into detail for general propositions.² It is interesting that what looks to Americans today like a matter of potentially large consequence looked in 1787 like a mere matter of detail, a subject not sufficiently momentous to merit the gravity of being addressed in the nation’s fundamental law.

The judgment of the Constitutional Convention was correct, in its context. Term limits limit choices, and hence are an excision, albeit small, from the sphere of civic freedom. No such excision should be made lightly or unnecessarily. However, the Founders’ rejection of term limits in 1789, although wise, was no wiser than adoption of term limits would be now. The Convention was wise to reject term limits because they were not clearly connected with correcting a large problem. Now they are.

To demonstrate why they are, this book will explore two realms that often are, but never should be, separate—the realms of thought and action. It will examine behavior and ideas—primarily the contemporary behavior of politicians and old ideas about politics. In doing this I am drawing upon three areas of my professional experience.

Journalism is the third, albeit much the longest, of my three careers. I am the son of a professor of philosophy and began my professional life as a professor of political philosophy. I anticipated a lifetime in academia. However, in my third year in academic life I was offered a position on the staff of a U.S. Senator. I accepted with alacrity and spent three stimulating and happy years on Capitol Hill, where I acquired a lasting love of the Congress. Then I became a columnist. So I have worked in the realms of thought (academia), of action (politics) and of thinking about action (journalistic commentary). I have come to an emphatic conclusion. It is that ideas matter.

My point is not just that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. When firmly held, ideas are motives for action. When important ideas are forgotten by a republic, the forgetting of them is the reason why the republic lists dangerously in one direction or another. The good news about the abundance of bad news concerning American politics and government right now is that bad news has concentrated the national mind. The decline of public confidence in government and the resurgent interest in term limits have got the nation thinking about fundamentals. And not a moment too soon.

Political philosophers have frequently argued that the civic health of a free people requires periodic reflection about first principles. America’s crisis of confidence in government in the 1990s can be good for this Republic if it provokes such reflection. It appears to be doing that.

It may seem hyperbolic to say that America in the 1990s is in a crisis. Never has the nation’s physical security from foreign attack been greater—never. True, there was at the beginning of the 1990s an unusually long economic recession, but it was not unusually deep, and business cycles are not crises unless they involve social convulsions like those of the Depression. However, the word crisis is not hyperbolic in the context of the early 1990s, because what is ailing the nation is the essence of the nation’s significance. What is in crisis is the public’s faith in that which most makes America matter: self-government. The acids of cynicism and contempt are corroding confidence in the institutions of collective action and are giving rise to fatalism about events that seem to be spinning out of control. There is national queasiness about the slow but perceptible and accelerating downward spiral of national vigor and standards. This queasiness is part of the most pronounced mood swing in the nation’s history, one coming after a moment of almost giddy triumphalism.

Contemporary history seemed to have an almost magical tidiness to it when the Berlin Wall fell (November 9, 1989) just three weeks after the sixtieth anniversary of the stock market collapse (October 24,1929) that plunged the United States into six strenuous decades of Depression, war and Cold War. The end of the Cold War was punctuated by an extraordinary assertion of American power in the suddenly unipolar world—Operation Desert Storm. But just when America seemed securely at the wheel of the world, Americans began to worry that the wheels were falling off their nation. In the astonishing fifteen months from the bombing of Baghdad to the burning of Los Angeles, Americans passed from a complacency tinged with hubris to an anxiety bordering on despair. There came upon the nation a sense of abandoned standards and waning supremacies, a conviction that other leaner, hungrier, better-governed nations are making America’s prosperity and position in the world precarious.

What needs to be recovered is a certain understanding of American democracy. Note that I speak not of democracy generally but of our American variant. The idea of democracy, severed from the context of a particular civic culture and its history, is an airy abstraction. But the American democratic tradition, rich in turbulent arguments, has distinctive values, a characteristic tang, and many tangible manifestations unique to it. We have lost much of the original sense of the drama of our democracy. Some of that loss is understandable, indeed inevitable, and not really regrettable. After all, two hundred years ago democracy was an experiment, and we were a novelty. Still, our continentwide laboratory of liberty is still the most noble, exciting and important political undertaking in history. And the difficulties confronting it today are, in