Subject: Re: From Jeff Tiedrich
I’m not sure why you’re focusing on “two” years. Maybe the term limits could be 10. Or maybe there’s a total for both houses of, say, 18 or something. (Pick a number, I don’t know what it should be.)

Oh, it's not about the length of the terms. It's how often you have elections. We have elections every two years, so the leadership will only serve for two years.

What happens with term limits - practically - is that the Legislature breaks down into classes based on the year they were elected. Let's say we have a five-term limit for the House, or ten years in total. Everyone that's elected in 2020 will reach their final term in 2028, and be out of the House by 2030. Everyone that's elected in 2022 will reach their final term in 2030, and be out of the House by 2032. Etc.

So immediately after the election in 2020, you know right then who all the senior people in the House will be in the 2028-2029 Congress. The current freshmen. Everyone more senior than them will be gone. It is literally impossible for anyone to be more senior, other than the ones who were just elected. So you know that the Speaker in 2028 will be a member of that "class." Whoever was previously Speaker will be termed out, so you'll have a new Speaker in 2028 - who will serve for exactly two years, before they are termed out.

That's what ends up happening. Regardless of how many terms you have, the most senior members of Congress in each two-year Congress will be the ones who were elected in the cycle X-2 years ago (where X is the number of years they can serve). Which translates into all of leadership - the Speaker, the Leaders, the whips, the important committee chairs - will assume their roles during the last two years of their allowable time in office.

So here in Florida, we'll know shortly after the 2024 elections who the Speaker of the Florida House will likely be in 2031. We have a four-term limit (two years per term), which means each cycle we elect about 30 Reps out of the 120 total. About 20 will be Republicans. One of those 20 will be the Speaker in 2031, when everyone more senior has been limited out. Typically, we'll know within a term or two who it will be.

The only difference with the U.S. Congress is that we don't know for sure which party will control the chamber, so there's uncertainty about which party the leadership will come from. But if you have term limits of X years, in every Congress the leadership will be drawn from the class that was elected X-2 years ago, and they will only have that two years in the post before they're replaced in the next cycle.