Reformers in both the House and Senate have taken steps to limit the automatic advantages of seniority. The president has been given a statutory line-item veto. Congress is grappling successfully with the budget deficit, thanks in part to the leadership of seasoned legislative leaders. What remains for advocates is a romanticized yearning for a supposed golden era long past, in which selfless citizens, free from the unseemly quest for reelection, temporarily answer their country's call to legislate in the public interest. High turnover and amateurism in the nineteenth century Congress and in state legislatures did more to nurture parochialism, corruption, and special interest influence than enhance the public welfare.
Professionalism is a necessary offshoot of the growth and specialization of the modern world.
If the political rules are rewritten to make it impossible to build a career in Congress, then the institution will have to rely on the professionalism of others to do its job, whether they are staff members, bureaucrats, or lobbyists. Finally, any effort to use term limits to replace careerists with citizen-legislators is likely to produce some combination of itinerant professionals with weak institutional loyalties and elite amateurs whose resources and connections make a brief stint in Congress possible and profitable. Term limits should be rejected not only because they would fail to achieve the objectives of their advocates. Their danger lies in the harm they might do to American democracy, by limiting the freedom now enjoyed by voters to end or continue the career of representatives who seek their continued support and by weakening the first branch of government by depriving it of experienced and knowledgeable legislators.