Subject: Re: From Jeff Tiedrich
Why is that? Right now leadership serves for two years, and then is re-elected if the bloc wants him/her to continue. If the term limits were, say, 12 years, you could have 6 years in the House, and you could be House Leader for as many of those as you could be elected to by your peers.

In theory, sure. In theory you could become Speaker of the House as a freshman congressman. In practice, it takes many terms of experience before you can do that. Mike Johnson's an anomaly - no other modern Speaker has landed in the spot after only three terms in office.

What happens in practice is that changing the structure of legislative terms ends up changing those legislators' behavior. You always know, in advance, the date on which every leadership spot will become open. So it's almost never to your advantage to pick a fight, rather than wait until "your turn" - because unlike the present system, you're always guaranteed to get your turn.

The first times a "senior" occupies a leadership role, everyone knows that it's going to be vacant the very next Legislative term - which means that a "leadership designate" invariably gets picked from the folks that aren't being term limited out. No one wants to be caught flat-footed, so people start working out their deals and consolidating support for the replacement - and they're almost always from the next preceding class, because they've been there for four terms. And then when that person is picked, everyone knows they're leaving within a term - so they start looking at who might replace that person in four years, among the people who have served three terms. Etc.

What ends up happening pretty quickly is that the process congeals into classes. Leadership is always in their last term, leadership-in-waiting is always in their second-to-last-term....and no one below that even tries to fight that process, because it's much safer to just wait until the seats are going to be open rather than try to dislodge someone who's been there much longer than you.

More turnover isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It should be used more frequently, not less.

Except it comes with problems. You end up significantly weakening the Legislature relative to the Executive, and you end up concentrating what power that remains into just the handful of members in leadership. That's what we've seen in Florida: the Executive rules supreme, and few people in the Legislature other than leadership matter - apart from the lobbyists and outside political factions that aren't term limited.

The reason the Executive's power increases is obvious - no matter who's current the leader in the Legislature, they'll be gone in two years. Without durability, you have less power - you can't make bargains that take more than the current Congress to implement, you can't threaten reprisals for more than the current session. People need only outwait you to try to get what they want from someone else.

And everything ends up being about Leadership, because there's no time or incentive to establish competing power structures. You could theoretically try to build a coalition in the chamber that would serve as a power base outside of leadership, but you just don't have the time to do that. Most of the people who currently have power are going to be term limited out in the next session or two, and by the time you get this set up you'll only have a session or two to use it. So no one invests any resources in really trying to do that.