Term Limits

Kyle’s read of Romney — A Reckoning attaches “term limits” to the Senate pathology Mitt Romney diagnoses: “job preservation as existential.” The book describes a chamber where the average age is sixty-three, where many members “attached an enormous psychic currency to their position — that they would do almost anything to keep it,” and where “retirement was death.” Romney recounts a new colleague telling him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” In his journal Romney distilled the dynamic to “Job preservation above principle preservation.”

Kyle’s marginal notes make his own position explicit — “We need term limits” on the passage about senators clinging to relevance, and “What a rockstar. So much better than the performative status quo” elsewhere — reading the chapter’s account of careerist incentives as the argument for capping tenure. The concept connects to the book’s themes of Civic Virtue and the workhorse-vs-performance Senate ethic.

Context: Congressional term limits are a recurring U.S. reform proposal that would cap the number of terms a member of the House or Senate may serve; there are currently no such limits for federal legislators, and proposals have repeatedly failed to clear Congress.

Where this appears

• Romney — A Reckoning — tagged on Romney’s diagnosis of “job preservation as existential” in the Senate; carries Kyle’s note “We need term limits.”