No. of Recommendations: 3
I tend to agree with that analysis, so I wonder if it can be true over here, but not over there?
Not just the Presidency - also Governors. But it works because the Executive is different than the Legislature. Because a Legislature is a collegial body with dozens or hundreds of members, and an Executive is a single office with only one officeholder.
When you're elected President - or a Governor - 100% of the power of that office is instantly yours on Day 1. There's only one President, only one Governor, so all of the power of the office is instantly available to the single person who occupies it. Arguably, that person is at the height of their political power right after they're first elected. Usually the act of getting elected brings a fair amount of political capital and everything that will be possible to do from that office is still possible, and the entire term is ahead of you so all of your allies and opponents know you have the maximum amount of time to bestow favors or mete out opposition.
Add to that the permanent staff of the Executive. Most of the federal government is permanent. A host of Departments and Agencies and full-time civil service staff, several hundreds of thousands of people strong. Granted, it's hard to wrestle that bureaucracy around - which is why its likened to turning a battleship. But still, on his first day in office, the President is handed a battleship to implement his policies.
The Legislature doesn't work that way. Any individual member is one of a hundred, or several hundred. The power of the chamber is divided, set in opposition to itself both between the competing parties and among the members of each party. The chambers have formal leadership structures and committees and a host of other things precisely to overcome the division of power, so that the members have mechanisms by which the legislative power can actually be exercised effectively and strategically. Even then, consider the results. It's a massive problem of collective action, four hundred and thirty-five people that all theoretically have exactly the same power (a single vote), that have to organize and work together to wield even the slightest amount of actual authority.
So legislators need time. They need to build relationships and alliances and shared interests and informal (or formal) coalitions so that the collective legislative power can meaningfully be exercised. Having legislators be in the chamber long enough to be powerful - or even just letting them fight tooth and nail for power over a short period of time - allows some of those pigs to be more equal than others, and power actually gets exercised. Term limits destroy that.
Worse, leadership is never in the role for more than two years. Committee chairs are never in the role for more than two years. In each Congress, in both chambers, all of the members in the most senior class (the ones who just are at the end of their last term) are always about to leave. In every Congress, it's always the last Congress for the more senior members - and since the senior members are the ones who will hold leadership positions, it means that the the Congressional leaders are always re-setting and are always new to the role. So while whoever newly wins the Presidency will certainly hold that role for four years, and possibly eight, whoever's the Speaker of the House or Budget Committee Chair in any given Congress will be gone in two years. Which means they have much less power - especially over the agencies and departments - than they do today.
