Leadership Quote by James L. Buckley

Buckley’s line is a sly piece of moral jujitsu: it argues for term limits not by attacking Congress’s competence, but by pitying its character. “Temptations” does the real work here. He doesn’t bother listing the lures of Washington - influence, money, flattery, the slow anesthetic of incumbency - because the audience is meant to supply them from their own cynicism. The phrasing assumes corruption is less an exception than a weather system: persistent, ambient, and hard to dress for.

The trick is the half-ironic piety of “the welfare of congressional souls.” Buckley, a conservative Catholic with a patrician taste for restraint, couches institutional reform in spiritual language that sounds almost pastoral. It’s a rhetorical backdoor. Instead of saying legislators can’t be trusted, he says they are human, and therefore vulnerable; term limits become an act of compassion. That framing lets him sound high-minded while delivering a bleak judgment: time in office doesn’t just distort incentives, it deforms the self.

Context matters. Buckley served in the post-Watergate era and watched modern incumbency harden into a semi-permanent career, with fundraising machinery and committee power rewarding longevity. In that world, “over the longer run” reads like an indictment of accumulation: the longer you stay, the more you’re asked to trade little pieces of independence for a seat at the table. Term limits, then, aren’t merely about refreshing representation; they’re about limiting the moral compromises that come with staying too long near the stove.