California voters approved term limits in 1990 because they were fed up with the same small clique of people running California’s government. Gerrymandering without term limits produces a system in which the very same people are reelected again and again in the same districts. Gerrymandering with term limits produces a system in which the same party wins again and again in the same districts, but the names of the representatives change. Both outcomes are bad for democracy, because there is no real competition, no clash of ideas, and therefore no real interest in the races from the electorate.
Term limits has another, more insidious consequence. It robs the Legislature of experienced leaders. While no one wants a system in which the same people serve 30 or 40 year terms as legislators, no matter how competent or incompetent they may be, we DO need the experience of a few legislators who have been around awhile and accumulated a lot of experience. Term limits mean that no one in each new Legislature has served more than six years prior to the beginning of the new term. Those who have served four years in the Senate or six in the Assembly are all lame ducks.
This skewers the incentives of state legislators. They have an incentive to grab whatever they can for themselves and their districts – projects that invariably raise state spending – and raise as much money as possible for a run at higher office. They have an incentive to raid the state coffers and let the next guy or gal worry about the long term health of California. The problem is, the next guy or gal encounters exactly the same system, and the same incentives. No one has any incentive to look at the longer term, or the bigger picture.
California politics therefore focuses on right now, this moment, this week, this current crisis. No one looks beyond the present moment to focus on ten or twenty years from now, when our children will need for us to have made smart decisions. The sum of all these distorted incentives is exactly what California has now – total dysfunction with fiscal anarchy lurking right around the corner.