Politics & Power Quote by James L. Buckley

Tie a job to a lifetime and you get employees; make it temporary and you might get stewards. Buckley is making that bet, and he does it with the calm moral vocabulary of American civic religion. The phrase "make a career of legislative service" is a polite indictment: it recasts long tenure not as expertise or representation, but as self-preservation. The target is the ecosystem that grows around permanence - fundraising dependency, committee fiefdoms, lobbyist intimacy, and the quiet fear that any principled vote could be a career-ending mistake.

The line is structured as a trade: remove the incentive to stay, and you remove the incentive to sell. "The temptation to bend a vote" is deliberately vague, a lawyerly catch-all that covers bribery, party pressure, donor demands, and the softer corruption of ambition. Buckley doesn't need to name a scandal; the ambiguity lets readers fill in their preferred villain, from K Street to leadership whips.

Then comes the rhetorical masterstroke: "better angels of their nature". It's Lincoln's language, summoned to bless a reformist argument with a near-biblical idea of latent virtue. Subtext: lawmakers aren't inherently rotten; they are rational actors in a warped incentive structure. Change the structure and you can call forth character. Context matters, too: Buckley, a conservative voice in an era increasingly skeptical of Washington, is offering term limits as a moral hygiene measure - an institutional tweak sold as spiritual renewal. The irony is that he frames a hard-edged, anti-incumbent power shift as a gentle invitation to conscience.