Mississippi has been preparing for the retirement announcement of one of its members of Congress.
The surprise, though, was the announcement came not from Thad Cochran, the well-respected but declining lion in the Senate, but from Gregg Harper, a congressman on the rise who was thought to be a possible replacement for Cochran should the 80-year-old step down.
Harper, who said he will not be seeking re-election this year, is not leaving, as some in Washington have, because he was expecting a challenge from the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party. At worst, the five-term congressman was looking at a token opponent.
Nor do there appear to be any scandalous bombshells waiting to drop.
Rather, Harper reached the unconventional but admirable decision that a decade in Congress, and the personal toll that it takes, was enough for him. He said in an interview following his announcement Thursday that he “never intended to make this a career and 10 years is a really long time to serve.”
It probably should be enough for most other lawmakers, too.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually how it works. Sometimes the intoxication of power gets the best of lawmakers. In other cases, such as Cochran’s, incumbents are pressured by their home states to hang on longer than their minds and bodies tell them they should because of the clout that comes with seniority. The power to channel federal money to a state is directly proportional to the years accumulated in Congress by that state’s delegation. Since committee chairmanships are largely based on seniority, and since most lawmakers are in no hurry to leave, you have to be in Washington for a while before you accrue much power. It took Harper five terms to start getting anything close to plum appointments.
The problem, though, with the congressional seniority system is that it co-opts — and sometimes corrupts — those who serve in those chambers. Because lawmakers are always focusing on their next election, and because they are always raising money for future campaigns, they tend to serve the interests of those who want favors from Congress rather than the interests of the country as a whole.
A couple of decades ago, during a previous Republican “revolution,” the newcomers ran on the idea that what Congress needed was term limits to keep that body fresh and less prone to influence-peddling. It didn’t take the revolutionaries long, however, to drop the idea once they were on the inside.
Mandatory term limits is probably a bad idea, since it penalizes experience and would hurt small states such as Mississippi. It is refreshing, though, to see someone like Harper recognize that the sun will still come up tomorrow if he’s not in Congress.
