This may sound like a strange solution. Why contemplate empowering these jokers for double their constitutionally allotted time? In short, the biennial ritual of electing a new House is a significant cause of the body’s inefficacy. The two-year term achieves exactly the opposite of what the founders hoped it would. In a political scene shaped increasingly by the demands of campaign fund-raising, the 24-month cycle only encourages bad behaviour.

In Federalist #52, James Madison laid out the justification for electing members of the House every two years:

As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the branch of it under consideration should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people. Frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.

This much is well known to any student of high-school civics. As the “People’s House”, the House of Representatives was designed to be highly responsive to the popular will. Whereas senators are elected to six-year terms to allow them to remain judiciously aloof from the whims of rapidly changing majority sentiment, members of the House are tied tightly to their constituents, and can be thrown out of office if they betray the people’s trust.

But Madison was not proposing the two-year cycle as an alternative to a longer term in office for members of the House; he was defending it against the annual elections demanded by the anti-Federalists and standard in many state legislatures at the time. Elections could theoretically be held “daily, weekly, or monthly, as well as annual[ly],” Madison wrote in Federalist #53, but “the knowledge requisite for federal legislation” requires a longer term in office. A “competent legislator” of “upright intention and a sound judgment” needs more than a year to learn the ropes and cater meaningfully to the nation’s needs.

In a country many times larger and more complex than the America of the 18th century, Madison’s argument applies today with compound interest. Two years is a ridiculously short period to master issues of domestic and foreign policy vital to the nation’s well-being. And as Andrea Seabrook of NPR reported in 2011, members of the House have little time to study the budget or even to read bills they are asked to vote on. They are consumed with fund-raising targets for the next election moments after taking the oath of office. One Republican legislator re-elected for his second term in November, Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, lamented the dilemma:

"The two-year cycle is very difficult and I've never been in politics before. I'm a family physician by trade, so it's an ongoing, I guess necessary part of the job, but I wish there was a better solution." Among his freshman Republican colleagues, [DesJarlais] says, "most people would say that [fund-raising is] the worst part of the job.”

There is little evidence that the House today is a beacon of Madison’s hope for “an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.” The incumbency advantage is strong, even if it isn’t quite what it used to be. This past fall, 91% of incumbents in the House were re-elected despite floor-scraping approval numbers of the institution as a whole.

If we give the bums two more years, they may well do their jobs more effectively. In a real-world experiment in Argentina in which legislators elected in 1983 were randomly assigned a two- or four-year term of office, Ernesto dal Bó and Martín Rossi found that longer was better. The legislators who served the four-year terms spent more time giving floor speeches, had better rates of attendance and introduced and ratified more bills than their shorter-term colleagues. Messrs Bó and Rossi attributed their increased effort to the enhanced return-on-investment legislators expect from the longer term:

Shorter terms appear to discourage effort not due to campaign distractions but due to an investment payback logic: when effort yields returns over multiple periods, longer terms yield a higher chance of capturing those returns. A broader implication is that job stability may promote effort despite making individuals less accountable.

It would take a constitutional amendment to extend the terms of House members—an unlikely scenario. And even if an amendment were to pass both houses of Congress and be ratified by the states, it would be unrealistic to expect the change to quell the legislative turmoil in Washington. Still, the Senate, with its longer terms, has a reputation of being marginally less dysfunctional than the lower house of Congress. The two-year cycle isn’t doing anyone any good. It makes for a fund-raising-obsessed, distracted, ideologically driven mass of elected officials who care more about protecting their seats than legislating. The House, and the nation, can do better. It’s time to think longer.

(Photo credit: AFP)