Will the third time be the charm? Cruz reintroduces congressional term limits measure - The Dallas Morning News

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is leading a group of six senators introducing a constitutional amendment to impose congressional term limits.

The amendment, which Cruz introduced Monday along with Republican Sens. Mike Braun of Indiana, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Marco Rubio of Florida, Todd Young of Indiana and Rick Scott of Florida, seeks to limit senators to two six-year terms and members of the House of Representatives to three two-year terms.

“The rise of political careerism in today’s Congress is a sharp departure from what the Founders intended for our federal governing bodies,” Cruz said. “I have long called for this solution for the brokenness of Washington, D.C., and I will continue fighting to hold career politicians accountable.”

Today my colleagues and I reintroduced a constitutional amendment to impose #TermLimits on Members of Congress. The amendment would limit U.S. senators to two six-year terms and members of the U.S. House of Representatives to three two-year terms. pic.twitter.com/1izmg5EQ6B

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) January 25, 2021

Terms starting before the amendment’s ratification would not be counted in determining a candidate’s eligibility.

Cruz was reelected to the Senate in 2018, so his second term would end in 2024. He has not indicated if he will stick to the principle and refrain from running for reelection then. However, even if the amendment were enacted before his next election, he would be eligible for reelection until 2036.

Texas’ senior Sen. John Cornyn was just reelected to his fourth six-year term in the Senate.

This is the third time Cruz has pushed for term limits. He introduced similar amendments in 2017 and 2019. In 2016, Cruz co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post in support of the amendment with then Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.

“With term limits, we will have more frequent changes in leadership and within congressional committees, giving reformers a better chance at overcoming the Beltway inertia that resists attempts to reduce the power of Washington,” they wrote.

There is bipartisan support for term limits, according to a Rasmussen poll from 2016 that found that 74% of likely voters favored establishing term limits for members of Congress.

Despite wide support that implementing term limits would help “drain the swamp,” some researchers say term limits actually increase political polarization. Casey Burgat, an associate fellow at the R Street Institute, a non-partisan public policy research organization, argued against the reform in a subcommittee hearing in 2019.

“Term limits have proven to be a brain drain on legislatures, decreasing capacity to perform their duties as a co-equal branch of government. Policymaking is a hard job, and an often thankless one at that,” Burgat said at the time. “...Experience matters and should be welcomed rather than ushered away from the institution where it will do the most good.”

A constitutional amendment is necessary to introduce term limits in Congress, according to a 1995 Supreme Court ruling. But constitutional amendments are historically tricky to pass — there have only been 27 constitutional amendments in U.S. history.

In order for the amendment to be passed, it must be approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and then be approved by three-fourths of the states.

A similar resolution, proposing two six-year terms for members of the Senate and six two-year terms for members of the House, was introduced by Florida Rep. Bill McCollum, a Republican. It failed to reach a two-third majority in the House in 1995, with a 227-204 vote.

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Will the third time be the charm? Cruz reintroduces congressional term limits measure - The Dallas Morning News
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