Tag Archives: Congressional Quarterly

national news

Term limits? We have ’em already!

Congressional Quarterly used to be known by those who covered Congress as the “Bible of all things related to Capitol Hill.”

Its reporting was so solid it did not require reporters to attribute facts found in CQ to the publication. It once reported that that issue of term limits was in reality a non-starter because the average length of terms for senators and House members didn’t merit much debate.

I saw a survey recently from CQ that put the average term length for House members at less than nine years; senators serve for a little more than 11 years on average.

I want to post this info as my statement that congressional term limits is a non-starter, in my view. We have term limits already. They are contained in the congressional elections we have every two years. The founders established elections every two years for House members. Senators serve for six years and one-third of the Senate is voted on every two years. The founders didn’t set term limits for the president, but they came after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, who succumbed in April 1945 after beginning his fourth term in the White House.

I get that some of the longer-serving members now make for vigorous debate fodder. They are few in number.

Let us look, therefore, at the larger view of Congress. It’s not a cesspool of individuals clinging to public office. Most of them serve their time and and then leave to do something else.

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Those were the days

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A news report about the deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill brought to mind something I learned many years ago about the Texas congressional delegation.

The state’s U.S. House members, divided between Ds and Rs, would meet each week for breakfast. They ate with each other. All of them! They would sit in the congressional dining hall and talk to each other about common ground. They would discuss the state’s myriad problems.

I believe I heard this tale during the era when a Texan, Fort Worth Democrat Jim Wright, was serving as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. I cannot recall at this moment whether Wright instigated the weekly breakfast meetings. All I do remember is that the congressional collegiality among Texans was legendary on Capitol Hill.

A Congressional Quarterly story about the Texas delegation’s weekly meetings compared the relative good cheer among our state’s lawmakers with the open hostility among other states’ delegations. I believe the CQ story compared Texans’ warm feelings with the chill that hung over the California delegation.

Bear in mind something about the Texas congressional delegation in the 1980s. The delegation included some fierce partisans on both sides of the aisle. My congressman was a fellow named Jack Brooks, a Democrat from Beaumont who was a crusty, irascible, profane, cigar-smoking, former Marine who pretty much detested Republicans. He had next to nothing nice to say about his GOP colleagues. I recall him telling me once that he thought President Reagan was dumber than a potted plant.

But he would go to those breakfasts with his colleagues. All of them. Republicans and Democrats.

I don’t know if they’re still meeting these days in that fashion. Nor do I know whether anyone within the Texas congressional delegation has the stature or the commanding presence of Speaker Wright.

Instead, I hear stories these days about House members fearing their colleagues. They actually are frightened by the prospect of working with them, of sitting beside them in the House chamber. They fear someone on the other side of the room is going to shoot them, for God’s sake.

My strong belief is that the current Texas congressional delegation just isn’t wired collectively to exhibit the kind of camaraderie that made its predecessors the envy of Capitol Hill.

Too bad.