Come January, seven state senators and 15 state representatives will be forced out of their current positions—not because they retired or because their constituents rejected them, but because of a decision made in a referendum nearly 30 years ago. 

These 22 legislators are all falling victim to term limits. In Louisiana, no person can be elected to more than three consecutive terms (12 years) in one chamber of the state Legislature. 

To many, the fate of these politicians is a good thing, a necessary evil or even just a natural part of the political process.

Term limits are almost as popular as politicians are unpopular. In fact, the 1995 vote that instituted legislative term limits in Louisiana, 76% supported the change. Every X (Twitter) post from a lawmaker over 50 years old is guaranteed to have at least one reply with someone screaming into the ether about term limits and retirement.

The typical idea is that term limits will reduce corruption, variously defined as anything from the accumulation of personal wealth to a reliance on special interests to a lack of responsiveness to constituents. Alternatively, they may be seen as a way to inject new blood into the political discourse and combat the incumbency advantage. 

The evidence (and logic) isn’t on the side of these arguments.

Term limits often lead to an increase in novice lawmakers who are forced by their own inexperience to rely more (not less) on the expertise of lobbyists and special interest groups. Additionally, lawmakers forced out by term limits will often turn around and pursue a career in lobbying.

As for the incumbency argument, term limits are 100% effective at kicking term-limited politicians out of their current positions. But is this something to celebrate? The solution to the incumbency advantage should be the elimination of the advantage, not the incumbency.

Even if term limits were effective at reducing corruption or connecting voters and their elected officials, they’d still be fundamentally repulsive.

Term limits are definitionally undemocratic. They are limits on who the people can elect. There’s not much difference between a list of candidates the state allows you to vote for and a list of candidates it forbids you to vote for. The former wouldn’t be tolerated, and the latter shouldn’t either.

What all this means is that Louisiana legislative and gubernatorial elections aren’t actually free. The voters of 1995 bind the voters of 2023 and will bind the voters of 2027.

Three decades ago, the phantom of corruption obscured the vision of those who supported the introduction of term limits. Today, that supposed solution restricts the will of voters even as the specter they feared so much still looms large. 

Voters don’t have true choice when they’re bound by both their own low political efficacy and the ineffective bandage they haphazardly stuck on the wound to make themselves feel better back during the Clinton administration.

The solution isn’t the perpetuation or expansion of term limits. They won’t fix problems now that they have yet to fix in the past few decades. Pushing down on an old band-aid, or slapping another on top, won’t heal the wound or stop the blood. It might even make it worse.

The actual solutions to corruption are good politicians and systems which encourage good behavior from them. Simply locking people out of another term does nothing. A corrupt politician who’s termed out may be replaced by another corrupt politician. An uncorrupted politician in the same predicament might be replaced by a corrupt one. Voters shouldn’t settle for throwing the good out with the bad.

So tear off the band-aid of term limits and start applying the ointment of elections.

Matthew Pellittieri is a 19-year-old history and political science sophomore from Ponchatoula.