What Isn't Here

Term limits, which I thought about for a long time and decided against.

Somewhere between two-thirds and five-sixths of Americans want them. They would pass my one test cleanly. Leaving them out costs me something and I know it.

I left them out because they would make the main problem worse. The failure at the center of this pamphlet is that nobody will close a deal. Deals get closed between people who expect to face each other again next year, and the year after — trust is just the record of what you did last time. Term limits cut that short and end every career in a final term where the person has nothing left to trade. You would be attacking the deal-closing problem by removing the thing that makes deals possible.

The states that tried it found something else too. Fifteen have term limits, and the knowledge doesn't disappear when the legislators do — it moves to the lobbyists and the permanent staff, who stay. A first-term representative across the table from someone who has worked that committee for twenty years is outmatched, and it shows up in the budgets.

But here is the plainest reason. Term limits are a workaround for elections that don't work. They are what you reach for when voters can't get rid of someone — and the reason they can't is that the seat was drawn safe and the primary was closed to them. This pamphlet proposes fixing both of those directly. Do that, and you don't need a rule capping how long someone may serve, because you have the real version: voters who can end it whenever they choose. Don't do it, and a term limit won't save you either.

And then the subjects I've left alone. Health care. Housing. Schools. Climate. Artificial intelligence.

Several of these matter more than anything I've written, and on AI I hold the least confidence of all — it may well not wait for us to put our house in order, and if that's true my sequencing is a mistake.

But I keep landing in the same place. We don't solve any of them with a government that can't pass a budget on time, can't stop its own members from trading on their oversight work, and can't close a deal three-quarters of the country already wants.

Fix the instrument. Then the hard arguments can be had honestly, and the answers will survive the next election.