25 years of ‘unintended consequences’: Tallahassee players look back on a quarter century of term limits

Hourglass on the background of a sunset. The value of time in life. An eternity.

After 25 years of term limits in the Florida Legislature, the takeaway from at least four people who have or still interact with the Process is simple: Unintended consequences. 

Speaking during a Tampa Tiger Bay luncheon Friday, neither former Senate President Tom Lee, current Sen. Darryl Rouson, Hillsborough County Property Appraiser and former state Rep. Bob Henriquez, nor lobbyist Ron Pierce said directly that term limits should be eliminated — and indeed they all agreed that doing so would be a massive undertaking. But each offered some pitfalls that came with what was a well-intentioned change.

The law, enacted in 1992, did not take effect until 2000. Its implementation prevented about half of House members from seeking re-election then, and some had been there for far longer than the eight years imposed by the new limits. 

Lee served in the Senate from 1996 to 2006, and again from 2012 to 2020, including as Senate President in the 2004-2006 term. That means he spent four years in the upper chamber alongside lawmakers who hadn’t been subject to term limits. He called them “knowledgeable, deep-thinking legislators.” Now, he explained, that institutional knowledge driving Tallahassee rests not with the lawmakers themselves, but with senior staff and lobbyists. 

Others on the panel agreed. 

Henriquez, who served in the House from 1998 until 2006, said term limits have eroded lawmakers’ ability to have the time needed to tackle big ideas.

“When you have a new group every couple of years, that can be difficult,” he said. 

Pierce, President and CEO of RSA Consulting, lamented that term limits have “completely empowered senior staff and lobbyists because we’re the ones walking around with all the institutional knowledge.”

But perhaps more troubling — or less problematic, depending on who’s asked — are changes to the legislative leadership process. Before term limits, leadership was earned over time. With an expiration that begins when a lawmaker is first elected, the Process can be rushed. 

“Sometimes that’s good for The Process, sometimes that’s bad for The Process,” Pierce noted. 

Both House and Senate leadership — Speakers and Presidents — are typically selected in their first term. As one audience member noted in a question, that doesn’t give more senior members of the Legislature time to vet whether someone is an effective lawmaker. 

The elephant in the room during what the panel described as a “retrospective” on the term limit question was the unfinished business lingering in Tallahassee. The House and Senate failed to reach a budget deal during the recently expired 60-day Legislative Session, sending the Process into overtime until June 6. It’s possible lawmakers could finish before that deadline. But it’s also possible they have to extend the Session even further. They have until the end of June to pass a budget. 

To be clear, no aspersions were cast. But Rouson, a Democrat serving in what is now a super-minority, took the opportunity to get a bit of frustration out. 

“I should be in Tallahassee helping to (craft the budget),” he groused, referencing Senate President Ben Albritton’s decision to send lawmakers home until after Memorial Day. Instead, he lamented, “We’re taking a vacation in the middle of work.”

Anyone who has ever worked directly in or adjacent to the legislative Process knows that the Tallahassee rumor mill can be noisy. The issue of current leadership has been no different. While term limits have sped up processes for selecting future House Speakers and Senate Presidents, it doesn’t always result in someone being handed the gavel in their final two years. That’s been the case this Session, with Albritton serving as President as his immediate predecessor, Kathleen Passidomo, still serves in the chamber. 

Lee offered that as a bright spot in this year’s Legislative Session, arguing she could helpfully impart her wisdom. Ask some others, though, and one might hear differently — that it may rather have been a “too many cooks in the kitchen” sort of scenario. 

Still, term limits over the past quarter century have shaped legislative politics in myriad ways. The finite tenure has “tipped the balance of power” in some ways, Lee said. 

“Back in the day, they could wait out the shot clock beyond the Governor,” he added, a reference to tabling some big idea or another if it didn’t sit well with the current executive, until a new Governor who might be more open is sworn in. 

Now, Lee said, lawmakers with future political ambitions — or any ambition that might need good political inroads — mean some lawmakers are “bowing at the feet of the executive branch.” 

It also had implications for the state budget. With limited tenures, the panel all agreed that budget outlooks can sometimes favor short-term priorities, without regard to long-term consequences for future elected bodies. That led to the creation of a three-year fiscal outlook, which happened during Lee’s tenure. 

And then there’s this: Do term limits even matter if districts are gerrymandered to favor one political party over the other? 

That question was posed by former state Sen. Janet Cruz, who also served in the House. 

And to Pierce, it does matter. He pointed to Rouson two seats away.

“What’s going to happen in 2026?” Pierce asked, explaining that Rouson is reaching his term limit and cannot seek re-election. “We’re going to elect a freshman.”

That means, Pierce said, “they’re not going to have anywhere near the influence” Rouson has in the Senate now. It’s a salient point, especially for Democrats. While Rouson is in the minority party, his years of experience — 17 years between his terms in the House and his time in the Senate — have earned him respect among colleagues on both sides of the aisle. So while some of his more green Senate Democratic colleagues might not get a seat at the table, he does. 

Another audience member posed another question: Are term limits even needed in a democracy? Can’t voters just vote people out if they’ve overstayed their welcome?

Henriquez said that was one of the counterarguments to the term limit question when it was posed in the 1990s. 

But Lee fired back that there was a problem with that logic, and it’s about the power of incumbency. 

“It’s very hard to beat an incumbent,” he said. They are better funded and their service provides them name recognition and a resume that’s hard to match for a newcomer. 

It sounds like a lot of negatives for a policy that’s been in place for a generation. But none suggested repealing term limits. 

“It’s sort of an incomplete thought,” Lee said, noting that the goals set out when term limits were established were noble, even if they haven’t all been achieved. He suggested perhaps reforms were needed. 

Someone asked if perhaps 12 years would work better for limits, instead of eight. 

“I think something like that might take some of the pressure off the internal politics,” Lee answered, adding that other creative solutions, such as allowing 16 years of service in the Legislature, but not tying that to eight in each chamber, necessarily. That would give lawmakers who chose to serve the majority of their years in one chamber “the ability to build some institutional knowledge.” 

But a word of caution from Pierce.

“A statewide referendum to change term limits would cost millions and millions of dollars,” he said.