Politicians are suffering. And last October former Florida Supreme Court justice and sometime lobbyist Wade Hopping was hopping mad about it.

The trouble? Term limits. They really irk politicians, as the citizens who have supported term limits had every reason to expect. The longer representatives serve in office, the more removed the representatives become from the concerns and interests of citizens. But boy, how expert they become in serving their own interests, and the interests of the biggest wheels!

But that's not how Hopping sees it. He doesn't see citizens as winning anything with term limits. But there are winners. "The legislative staff," he says.

I hear this a lot from "experts" in the capitols of the states with term limits for their representatives. The problem, it is said, is that with less experience, legislators rely more heavily on staffs.

That sounds bad, doesn't it?

In Arizona, two recent studies each explored the terra incognita of the state's term limited legislature. They came to some dramatically different conclusions, most of which were downplayed in the media. The study by a group called ThinkAZ was so not "The Sky Is Falling" that most coverage consisted of quotes from hysterical politicians arguing against term limits, and not about the study itself; it just wasn't "good enough" copy. The other study had a more consistently negative spin to it, so it got more play:

[W]hile power may have been lost by legislative leaders, it seems to have been ceded to others. Unelected others.
The Morrison study found that the lack of institutional understanding of the legislative process has increased the influence of those people who know where the skeletons are buried: Capitol lobbyists, for example. And permanent staff, especially the partisan staff aligned with legislative leaders. Anecdotally, we have observed partisan staff ? people who historically remained on the sidelines ? assuming major roles in promoting legislation.

Now, the idea that lobbyists have gained power with term limits is laughable. Oh, you can probably find lobbyists who will advance the claim, when they argue against term limits, but such talk is a ruse. All in all, the shorter the terms served, the more time lobbyists have to spend re-investing in new representatives.

Politicians are hard to buy, actually. It's often said that you can only rent them. But with term limits, lobbyists are limited to the length of the rental agreements. That's why lobbyists are so consistently against term limits.

The idea that their staffs might gain power over legislators, however, sounds more plausible. And yet . . . something seems wrong.

If one is going to rest one's case on "anecdotal" evidence, then I suspect the anti-term limits folk are choosing the wrong anecdotes.

The most striking anecdote showing legislators being "played" by their staffs made national headlines a few weeks ago. You remember the story. Another humungous omnibus bill was pushed through Congress, pushed so quickly after committee that no representative had time to read it. Considering its size, over 3,000 pages, it's a wonder anyone could.

But, after passage, and after the forklifts had delivered the bill to flummoxed reps, then the reading process began. And inside was found the most peculiar provision. It allowed staffers on the House and Senate appropriations committees to examine the tax returns of individual U.S. citizens. Continued...