Gov. Ron DeSantis, who played baseball at Yale, employed a metaphor from his former sport in arguing for congressional term limits.
“You are never going to have a better hanging curveball politically in your career than term limits. I could be speaking at the Chamber of Commerce of Delray Beach. I could be speaking to the Elks Club, whatever. And I’ll talk about, you know, Florida, you know, we have a budget surplus. Yeah, we’ve cut taxes, we have this, this. And you know what? We need to term limit Congress. Yay, everyone starts going, and I’ve seen this for so many years. So like the polling’s great and I trust it, but I don’t even need that to know. I see how people respond to it. So I think you have an opportunity to really get behind an issue,” DeSantis said this week at the Term Limits Summit.
He also spoke of being a “recovering Congressman” and how he didn’t expect to be in the House of Representatives for long when he was there for nearly three terms between 2012 and 2018.
“Some of the people in this movement were like, don’t term limit yourself. And I’m like, why? They’re like, because you just, you want to, we want people that believe in term limits to be there and then do it. And so, but I knew I was going to be there long. I just, I was gonna go and and try to make a difference, but there’s no way I would have been able to do it for 30 years,” DeSantis said.
“I kind of knew the issues, but like the idea that you’re going to have any type of authority to be a committee chair, you got to be there for 20 years. You got to be there for 25,” he added, saying the structure blocks people with a “reformer” mindset rooted in “idealism” from working to “turn Washington upside down” and “exercise real power,” leading to “neutered” long-haulers in the House.
While there’s “turnover in seats that don’t matter,” DeSantis says leadership is entrenched and that term limits would allow career politicians to keep moving up.
“You have a congressman that just gets elected, you know six years later, you’re going to have an open seat and you’re going to have a chance,” he said.
