Congress Doesn’t Need Four-Year House Terms

 Congress Doesn’t Need Four-Year House Terms

It’s tempting to assume that relieving the pressure imposed by frequent elections might improve government. But that’s not how politics works.

Changes could help, but ...

Changes could help, but ...

Photographer: Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg

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Should U.S. House terms be longer?

Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, argued in a New York Times essay this week that four-year terms in the House of Representatives would have important advantages. For policymakers, it would allow years, instead of months, before the next election loomed. For voters, it would provide a more reasonable chance to assess an incumbent party’s record.

It’s worth considering, but I don’t think so.

I’ll start with voters. As Pildes says, voters collectively tend to vote “retrospectively” — that is, they reward good performance and punish bad, especially good or bad economic performance. And there’s some logic to the idea that fewer than two full years isn’t enough time to build a record that can be judged fairly. Indeed, in some cases the parties of presidents who were elected because of a bad economy wind up getting punished in midterm elections because it takes too long for things to improve.

And yet, the argument still doesn’t fly. For one thing, political scientists who study retrospective voting have found that voters don’t react to the cumulative record of the in-party since the last election. Instead, voters have such short memories that they basically ignore everything that happened before the final months leading up to elections. So voters wouldn’t really gain a longer-term perspective, but they would lose the chance to judge additional points in time.

That’s not all. Elections aren’t only about voters as individuals who are otherwise not involved in politics. Elections are also crucial to the process of representation, in which politicians make promises to their constituents during one election, govern with those promises in mind, and then return and explain their actions in the context of the original promises — and then start all over again in the next election. That process works because organized groups, especially political parties, pay close attention to politics and government and try to hold politicians to those promises.

Two-year terms aren’t the only way to have a healthy process of representation. U.S. senators manage it with six-year terms. But there’s another piece to this puzzle, which is that midterm elections allow members of Congress to at least potentially remove themselves from the shadow of the president. House elections have already become far more dependent on party than on individual candidates and their actions; four-year terms, coordinated with presidential elections, would make it that much harder for individual politicians to carve out their own paths.

And that gets to the governing side of things. The U.S. system, rare in the world, is driven by a Congress that truly legislates, rather than a parliament that basically approves or perhaps modifies whatever the executive chooses. But the long-term trend has been for the presidency to grow stronger and stronger, and over the last 25 years or so, Congress has grown weaker. Four-year House terms coordinated with presidential elections would almost certainly make Congress even more subordinate to the presidency, given that members would lose their current (small, but still real) electoral buffer setting them apart from the White House.

It’s true that midterm elections are a distraction from governing. They are also, however, an important incentive to get things done. Right now, House and Senate Democrats feel an urgent need to get things done in time to have accomplishments to run on in 2022. (Do voters care? It doesn’t matter; incumbents believe it is important to have accomplishments to tout on the campaign trail). With four-year terms, the pressure would be off, and instead of using the time to craft better bills, it’s just as likely that members of the House would spend the time fundraising, or showboating, or even just goofing off.

Four-year House terms would tend to make unified government more common, and divided government less so. But the efficiency of unified government is overrated. The first two years of the Donald Trump presidency, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress along with the White House, produced only one major bill — a tax cut — and it ended with a government shutdown. During Trump’s second two years, with Democrats in charge of the House, divided government produced a rapid and massive response to the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps the same thing would have happened had Republicans retained their House majority in 2018, but divided government didn’t prevent it. Besides, it’s unclear that unified governments elected by very narrow majorities (or, in 2016, not by majorities at all) have a clear path toward passing legislation even for the first two years, and surely not for a four-year stretch.

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I like the idea of thinking through big changes to the U.S. system. We shouldn’t regard the Constitution as perfect. But frequent elections really are important to healthy representation and they provide positive incentives for good governance. There are structural changes worth making (starting with the malapportionment of the Senate), but the two-year House term is one thing that the Framers got right.

1.  L. Felipe Mantilla at the Monkey Cage on Catholic and evangelical politics.

2. Arthur Delaney, Amanda Terkel and Jennifer Bendery on Republican politicians and the vaccine.

3. Perry Bacon Jr. on living in partisan bubbles.

4. Dylan Matthews on inflation.

5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

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Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

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