Term Limits and a Legacy of Snark

So, back in college, I will confess that I would, on a regular basis, voluntarily, leave Manhattan on the weekends to partake in a strange, strange ritual called Parliamentary Debate. And my partner and I were fond of running a pro-term limits case. It was one of the ones we'd kept around longest, and so got refined to the point where it was pretty brutal, if I do say so myself.

Invariably, our opponents would claim that without experience and institutional memory, the power of lobbyists and special interests on naive legislators would dramatically increase. And we had a whole raft of snarky responses deploying arguments from public choice theory and psychology to prove that this wouldn't happen, that our poor, deluded opponents were hopelessly off-base.

Well, whoops.