The socialists are half-right: Ban reelection, not the Senate

Tuesday’s midterm elections will settle control of Congress for two years. They will also quietly start the next campaign. By Wednesday morning, would-be presidential candidates will be booking trips to early-primary states, and newly elected House members will be back on call time, raising money for 2028.America has less a governing problem than a reelection problem. Presidents spend half of their first term running for the second. Senators, elected for six years, lose roughly two of them to campaigning. House members, elected for two years, never stop. The result is a government built to win elections rather than solve problems, and the bills come due where everyone can see them: aging infrastructure, Social Security fixes pushed off for another cycle, immigration compromises that never make it to the runway. Good character can’t fix a calendar that leaves too little time to govern.The Democratic Socialists of America have an answer: abolish the Senate and remake the presidency and the Supreme Court. Their frustration is understandable. Their remedy is wrong. The branches aren’t broken; the incentives on the people inside them are. A system that has carried us through two and a half centuries deserves tuning, not demolition. Here is the tuning: a single eight-year term for the president, a single eight-year term for senators, and a single four-year term for House members, none renewable, paired with a narrowly drawn constitutional recall right so voters can still remove anyone who abuses that freedom. Most successful presidents already serve about eight years, so this is less about lengthening the job than about removing the re-election campaign from its middle. It would also sharply reduce the lame-duck effect. Today a president governs under two clocks. In the first term, the campaign clock pulls attention toward re-election. In the second, the lame-duck clock starts almost immediately: Congress, the press and the president’s own party look past him to the race to replace him, and agencies and foreign governments learn they can wait him out.Nobody can wait out an eight-year clock. A single term removes the campaign clock and pushes the lame-duck period to the very end. Nor is the idea new.Writing to James Madison in December 1787, Thomas Jefferson worried about the Constitution’s silence on rotation in office, “most particularly” for the presidency, fearing a president always eligible for reelection would become an officer for life. Congress applied Jefferson’s logic with the 22nd Amendment, though the Republican Congress that passed it in 1947 was reacting to Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms as much as honoring principle. Today’s congressional reelection rates suggest Jefferson was right about the legislature, too. The lesson is encouraging: Tenure reform passes when dysfunction makes the case obvious.The payoff is real. Fewer campaigns mean less fundraising and less donor leverage over the people writing our laws. Guaranteed turnover means no one entrenches for decades. And officials freed from the next election might finally take on what everyone agrees is urgent and nobody wants to touch: Social Security, the tax code, immigration.One fair objection: Won’t a fixed term just redirect ambition from courting voters to courting a future employer? The risk is real but smaller than it looks. Officials already build post-office careers, reelection or not. A career politician can cultivate the same donors for decades — a one-term official gets a single window, watched by a recall right.Recall is what keeps this from being a leap of faith. Its grounds would be narrow: corruption, dereliction of duty, and clear abuse of office, not policy disagreement. Signature thresholds would be high, in line with the 25% to 40% of the prior vote some states require, and spread across enough states that a few large ones couldn’t force a national vote. Succession would follow existing law. Two guardrails would keep recall from becoming a second campaign season: No petition until an official has served a minimum stretch, and a cap on attempts per term.The judiciary stays out of this. Judges never faced the reelection pressure this proposal targets, and on the bench, longer tenure means more experience.TWO YOUNG JEWS, TWO EXTREMES, ONE QUESTIONNone of this would be easy, and it shouldn’t be. Article V requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or a convention called by two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states. Congress has little appetite for limiting its own tenure, so a state-led convention is the likelier path. Details such as restaggering Senate classes are solvable. The 17th Amendment, which changed how senators are chosen without abolishing the office, shows how.What’s on offer is a fair trade: more freedom from the next election, in exchange for a real way to remove anyone who abuses it. The midterm elections will be over in two days. The next campaign will start the morning after. It’s time to ask whether it has to.Jeff Monassebian is the founder and managing attorney of Technology Practice Group LLC, a New York law firm specializing in technology, data, and AI transactions. Follow him on X: @JMonassebian