Philip Blumel: Goodbye, Dick Durbin. Hi, I’m Philip Blumel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement. This is episode number 262, published on May 5th, 2025.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from partisan politics.
Philip Blumel: After 44 years in the U.S. Congress, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has announced he will not run for re-election in 2026. He’s 80 and said it was time to face reality and make way for someone new. Here’s how Senator Durbin put it himself during the Q&A after his retirement announcement.
Speaker 3: When did you first start considering that this was going to be your last term? Was there something that was sort of a tipping point for you?
Senator Dick Durbin: No, this came down to this. I’m 80 years old, all right? I feel good and strong and healthy and go to work like I’m supposed to, travel back and forth to Washington every week. But I had to project forward. A campaign is going to last two years, and then you’re going to serve six years. So are you ready to make an eight-year commitment? That’s the truth and the reality of the United States Senate. I didn’t think at this point it was the right thing to do. I think it was the right thing to pass the torch on to another generation.
Philip Blumel: Well, surely he must be commended for that. Too many of his colleagues will cling to power until they’re demented or removed from office on a stretcher. With our automatic re-elections in Congress, Senator Durbin could have realistically counted on winning another six-year term in the U.S. Senate. However, I’m also pleased to say goodbye for another reason. Senator Dick Durbin was one of the obstacles to getting a vote on congressional term limits in the U.S. Senate. As the second-highest Democrat in the U.S. Senate, he has long stood arm-in-arm with Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in blocking any move towards a vote on congressional term limits. His opposition to term limits started early in his career. As a member of the House of Representatives in the early 1990s, he voted against the term limits proposals that were brought forward at that time. In 2012, after Durbin was elected to the U.S. Senate, there was a quote-unquote sense of the Senate resolution on congressional term limits proposed by then-Senator Jim DeMint. This was a non-binding amendment that expressed that Senators should serve no more than two terms and that Representatives should serve no more than three terms in office.
Philip Blumel: The amendment was rejected by the Senate on February 2, 2012, with a vote of 24 to 75. Surprise, surprise. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois voted nay on this amendment, along with Senator McConnell. So, with the retirement of Senator Durbin, there will finally, after decades, be a competitive election for this Illinois Senator seat. There will be lots of challengers who have been blocked from running in the past. Some will be younger and more open to new ideas. The kinds of candidates that Democratic Party Vice Chair David Hogg has been championing to replace the party’s aged leadership. As David Hogg himself tweeted on X a few years back, we need congressional term limits. He’s right. Senator Dick Durbin’s retirement removes one obstacle in the way. Next, today is Monday, May 5th. Feliz Cinco de Mayo. Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 6th, we have a vote scheduled in the South Carolina State Senate to approve the term limits convention resolution. Along with Indiana and South Dakota, a win tomorrow would make South Carolina the third state so far in 2025 to call for an amendment proposing convention limited to the subject of congressional term limits. The South Carolina House has already approved it earlier this year.
Philip Blumel: So a win tomorrow will bring the number of states that have officially called for the term limit convention to 12. If you live in South Carolina, please, right now, go to termlimits.com/takeaction. Along with Indiana and South Dakota, a win tomorrow would make South Carolina the third state to call for an amendment proposing convention limited to the subject of congressional term limits. We need 34 states to force a convention, but history suggests Congress will act before we get to that magic number when they see the writing on the wall. Since we launched this project, we have won a state or two each year. Last year, we won three for the first time, our best year yet. We believe 2025 will surpass that record, but we have to win in South Carolina. Again, that’s termlimits.com/takeaction if you live in South Carolina. Decision makers need to hear from you right now. We have the momentum. It’s time to press hard. Next, Dr. Randy Holcombe strikes again. Many times on this podcast, we have discussed Dr. Holcombe’s important 2019 study with Robert J. Miner that looked at historical data from the term limits era, comparing term limited and non-term limited legislatures before and after the imposition of term limits.
Philip Blumel: The conclusion? State government budgets grew significantly more slowly after term limits took effect. Or, in other words, lobbyists in the aggregate were less successful in teasing spending favors out of term limited legislators. This is a clear rebuttal of the claim of many politicians that if they were term limited, the lobbyists would run the show. Well, now Dr. Holcombe is at it again with a new article published in March by the Independent Institute. Its title is Term Limits and the Rule of Law, and we include it in its entirety here, read by the author. Take it away, Randy.
Dr. Randall Holcombe: Rule of law means that there is an objective set of laws that applies to everyone. Nobody is above the law. The alternative is rule by power. Those who have political power determine the rules and enforce them on the masses. Without rule of law, rules are subject to change depending upon the preferences of the politically powerful. Without rule of law, the rules constraining the masses do not apply to the powerful. One criticism sometimes leveled against term limits is that it takes time to learn how to do the job and that by term limiting people out of office, citizens lose the benefit of the institutional knowledge the officeholders have accumulated. This argument has several shortcomings. The most significant problem with that argument is that the institutional knowledge officeholders acquire includes ways to use their power to evade the legal constraints designed to prevent the abuse of power. The longer an individual holds political power, the more experience that individual gains. This inside knowledge that officeholders acquire enables them to discover ways to work around the constraints that come with rule of law. What most elected officials need to know to do their jobs is part of rule of law.
Dr. Randall Holcombe: Legal institutions specify the powers and obligations of elected officeholders, and rule of law means that those who hold elective office abide by those institutional constraints. The law gives officeholders well-defined instructions on their exercise of power from day one. The longer someone is in office, the more able that person is to find ways to evade the constraints embodied of rule of law to expand and abuse their powers. The institutional knowledge people gain while in office includes, among other things, ways to avoid the institutional constraints that are designed to limit the abuse of political power. A related argument in support of term limits is that electoral processes give an advantage to incumbents. Elections are not held on a level playing field, so incumbents have an overwhelming advantage. With term limits, those who have political power know they cannot keep it forever, so they have less of an incentive to expand the powers attached to the offices they temporarily hold. Doing so temporarily increases their power, but permanently gives more power to those who replace them. Another advantage of term limits is that they break the relationship between lobbyists and legislators. Over time, legislators are visited by the same lobbyists, creating a personal relationship between them.
Dr. Randall Holcombe: Term limits breaks those relationships so lobbyists must develop new relationships when new legislators take office. That takes time, which lessens the influence of special interests. When opponents of term limits talk about the benefits of retaining institutional knowledge, they never consider repealing the term limits on the American presidency. Term limits have worked well when applied to the President of the United States. Do those people who oppose term limits think that being a senator, representatives, city commissioner, or school board member requires more experience and more institutional knowledge to get up to speed than being president? The longer people hold political power, the more adept they become at undermining rule of law. We should not want officeholders to become too skilled at exercising political power. To maintain rule of law, people who hold political power should be replaced on a regular basis. Among the many arguments that support term limits, their role in preserving rule of law is the most important.
Philip Blumel: Thank you, Dr. Holcombe. You make a very important point here that deserves greater emphasis. You call it the most important argument for term limits, and you may be right. Dr. Randall G. Holcombe, by the way, is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He’s the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University and author of the book Liberty in Peril, Democracy and Power in American History. Okay, next. As president of U.S. Term limits, I guess I have to confront, again, the issue of Donald Trump’s trumpeted third term, now that the red Trump 2028 hats have hit the street. Truth is, I don’t take the threat very seriously. The 22nd Amendment of the Constitution is very clear on this issue, and it is not clear at all that Trump is serious when he trolls the media about running again. I tackled this issue in the last episode and don’t really want to repeat myself, but here’s the latest. On Meet the Press over the weekend, Trump said of running again, I’m not looking at that. This followed a couple of weeks of saying just the opposite. But in a different interview, he was also asked about the upcoming papal conclave and whether he had a preference in the choice of a new pontiff. And here’s what he said.
President Donald Trump: As pope? Yeah. I’d like to be pope. That would be my number one choice.
Philip Blumel: Now, you could decide if the Vatican needs to rearrange its schedule to battle Trump’s threat here against world Christendom. But at U.S. Tournaments, we’re not going to let Trump’s jokes about a third term derail the momentum that we have right now for the term limits convention. The TLC strategy to impose tournaments on Congress is real, not just a meme, not a joke, and it’s working. Rest assured, if the president took real action towards abolishing eight-year presidential tournaments, we’d be at the front lines. As of now, we got our hands full. Let the president have his fun. And now, a short update on the Bob Menendez case. As you recall, on July 16th, Senator Robert Menendez was found guilty on all counts after being tried on charges of accepting bribes of gold bars and cash as payment for benefiting the governments of Egypt and Qatar. This man was chair of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee. Now, we’ve been featuring this story ever since his indictment, so I don’t need to go through all these details again.
Philip Blumel: The FBI raid, the gold bars, the suit jacket, pockets full of cash. He’s going to prison this week. But the fresh news is that Senator Menendez’s wife, Nadine, has also been convicted on all 15 of her counts as an accomplice to Bob’s corruption, including bribery, honest services wire fraud, and conspiracy for a public official to act as a foreign agent. Prosecutors accused Nadine Menendez of starting to facilitate bribes to the senator around the time that they started dating, before they married in the fall of 2020. Senator Robert Menendez had divorced his first wife and mother of his two children in 2018. The senator was the one whose power was up for sale, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni told a federal jury last month. “The defendant, Nadine, was his go-between, demanding payment, always keeping him informed.” As we finally put the story to bed, I’m haunted by one unanswered question. When did the rot in his soul begin? Senator Bob Menendez was a career politician who spent about 50 years in office, including 30 years in Congress. So I ask you, was Senator Menendez a crook in 1974 at age 20 when he won a seat on the Union City, New Jersey School District Board of Education?
Philip Blumel: Now, I don’t know the man, but do you think I’m out of line if I were to suggest that maybe he wasn’t a crook? Was he a crook in 1986 when he ran for mayor of Union City, New Jersey? How about when he served in the New Jersey legislature in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Was he a crook when he entered the U.S. House in 1993? Or how about when he won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2006? How about when, in 2012, he voted against the sense of the Senate resolution calling for congressional term limits? Or maybe in 2015, when Menendez was indicted on unrelated federal corruption charges the first time, when the jury was unable to reach a verdict and the charges were dropped? How about when he left his wife of 30 years? And when he started dating and then marrying a criminal co-conspirator? When did the change occur? Well, I don’t know the answer, of course. But we know that corruption is highly correlated to tenure in office. Tenure breeds the arrogance and, of course, the opportunity for self-dealing that brings so many politicians down. Congressional term limits, if they existed, may have ended his career in Washington as early as 1999, years before any criminal activity was suspected and before his family fell apart.
Philip Blumel: Politicians, I always say, have a self-interest in opposing term limits, and of course that’s true. But an underappreciated benefit of term limits is that they may save a politician from themselves, from having their character chipped away under the perverse incentives and temptations of their occupation. Who can doubt that both the country and Bob Menendez himself would have benefited from a rule that would have pushed this very weak man away from the trough in time? Next, and last, we’ll finish with a short aside from Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. On Newsmax’s Wake Up America program, his frustration with congressional inaction led to this short aside a few weeks ago.
Rep. James Comer: That’s a sign that we need term limits here. When people are… They can’t see the forest for the trees, they’re tripping over a procedural bill, and it’s so frustrating.
Stacey Selleck: Like the show? You can help by subscribing and leaving a five-star review on both Apple and Spotify. It’s free.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. The Term Limits Convention bills are moving through the state legislatures. This could be a breakthrough year for the Term Limits movement. To check on the status of the Term Limits Convention resolution in your state, go to termlimits.com/takeaction. There, you will see if it has been introduced and where it stands in the committee process on its way to the floor vote. If there’s action to take, you’ll see a Take Action button by your state. Click it. This will give you the opportunity to send a message to the most relevant legislators urging them to support the legislation. They have to know you’re watching. That’s termlimits.com/takeaction. If your state has already passed the Term Limits Convention resolution or the bill has not been introduced in your state, you can still help. Please consider making a contribution to U.S. Term Limits. It is our aim to hit the reset button on the U.S. Congress, and you can help. Go to termlimits.com/donate. Termlimits.com/donate. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
Stacey Selleck: Find us on most social media at U.S. Term Limits. Like us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and now LinkedIn.
Speaker 8: U.S.T.L.