Along Interstate 93 in Methuen, Massachusetts, a billboard informs voters that their representative in the U.S. Congress, Lori Trahan, has broken her pledge to serve only three terms in the House.
Trahan (who happens to by my representative in Congress) was re-elected in 2022 to a third term from the 3rd district of Massachusetts, which includes towns such as Methuen, Lowell, Haverhill, and Lawrence.
During her first run for Congress in 2018, she found herself in a tight Democratic Party primary race. In an attempt to set herself apart, she signed a pledge -- proffered by the organization U.S. Term Limits -- to limit herself to three terms in the House.
She won that primary by fewer than 200 votes, which for all intents and purposes assured her a seat in Congress in the heavily Democratic-leaning district. Given her pledge, this term should be it for Trahan.
As this article points out, Trahan has announced that she will not co-sponsor or vote for legislation introduced in the current session of Congress that proposes a limitation to the number of terms individuals may serve in Congress.
Coincidentally, the legislation caps the terms of House members at three.
Trahan believes that merely having co-sponsored similar legislation in the House in a prior term fulfilled her primary commitment. Now that she has been in Washington for a few years, the idea is suddenly "a bad bill."
Trahan and hundreds of her colleagues of both parties are walking clichés, convinced of their unique influence and insight and the antithesis of citizen legislators.
What would the people of the 3rd district or the United States ever do without her and her careerist colleagues?
Power-mad career politicians such as Trahan are clearly unwilling to release their grip on the instruments of government and the staggering advantages of incumbency. They have used such power wantonly – in many cases illegally – for their curious self-enrichment during their dishonorable tenures as "public servants."
These politicians will never actively work to begin or advance the process to amend the Constitution to force themselves to do something else with their lives. They refuse to re-establish the concept of the citizen legislator envisioned by the founders and observed until the misnamed Progressive Era. Trahan's shameful backtracking is but the latest example.
“Potomac Fever” is easily contracted among the newly elected in tandem with a sudden onset of indispensability, both of which metastasize with time.
Trahan's empty commitment is, to some extent, learned behavior. As she never tired of telling anyone who would listen during her 2018 campaign, she mastered the ways of Congress as a staffer in the office of then-U.S. Representative Marty Meehan.
Indeed, Meehan himself broke his own pledge to term-limit himself and enjoyed several terms in Congress. Trahan merely continues the tradition.
It is a sorry spectacle, particularly given the kinds of statesmen that once represented Massachusetts. Consider the words of John Adams:
“It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power. The passions are all unlimited; nature has left them so; if they could be bounded they would be extinct..."
There is recourse for the vast majority of Americans who, regardless of political affiliation, clamor for term limits. Article V of the Constitution permits the state legislatures to apply for a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments to address issues such as term limits and the seemingly endless expansion of power of the D.C. leviathan.
Term limits are a pillar of the Convention of States movement. An Article V convention of states will go far to eliminate the necessity of interest groups purchasing billboards to remind voters of broken promises and the desperate quest to cling to power by those posing as citizen legislators.
Sign the COS petition and join the movement.
