The nation’s longest-serving legislative leader, Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, recently announced his intentions to run for his 14th term in the North Carolina Senate. Berger has served as president pro tempore, the top position in the chamber, since 2011.
Until recently, Congressman Tim Moore, R-NC14, served nearly 10 years alongside Berger as the House Speaker — becoming the state’s longest-serving speaker in 2022. After several longstanding state legislative leaders retired in 2022, Moore became the third longest-serving House speaker in the entire country. With the election of Speaker Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, North Carolina has a new leader in a legislative chamber for the first time in a decade.
Regardless of who it is, leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly should not stay this concentrated for this long.
In a recent report on reforming the North Carolina General Assembly, my colleague Dr. Andy Jackson and I show why North Carolina should consider leadership term limits for House speaker and Senate president pro tempore. It is a reform with growing interest around the nation. Nineteen legislative chambers across 14 states currently have some form of leadership term limits. Seven of them instituted these limitations within the last decade.
For North Carolinians, limitations placed on how long someone may serve in a specific office are not a foreign concept. The governor of North Carolina has been bound by term limits ever since the earliest version of our state constitution. Ratifiers of the state constitution distrusted executive authority, having witnessed the history of abuse the state suffered from British royal governors during the colonial era.
The core of this philosophy in the modern context is limiting the chief executive’s time in office to prevent power from stagnating in the hands of one individual. An entrenchment of power can lead to a lack of new ideas, create longstanding grudges, or open room for political corruption. These problems are not unique to the executive branch, as the founders of our great nation well knew.
Under the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, members of Congress were bound by term limits of no more than three years within any six-year time period. Though Anti-Federalists were keen to keep some form of term limits in place, they ultimately lost this debate. Ratifiers of the US Constitution thought entrenchment of legislative power would be impossible with terms lasting only two years and with the then-prevalent culture of voluntary rotation. History, however, seems to favor the Anti-Federalist’s argument — legislative bodies throughout the country have experienced an era without rotation of officers, especially in leadership.
For example, the North Carolina House speaker traditionally served only one term as leader. Not only did the speaker rotate every term, but so did the part of the state from which a speaker hailed. If the previous speaker were from the western part of the state, then the new speaker would be from the east. This tradition was abandoned in the late 1970s, coinciding with the passage of a ballot amendment in 1977 that allowed the governor and lieutenant governor to serve a second successive term in office and influenced by the unique relationship between the governor and legislative leaders.
In North Carolina, legislative leaders have the power of direct appointment, which in most other states is considered exclusively an executive power. Along with the governor, legislative leaders here can appoint individuals to various boards and commissions without the need for legislation. Many legal battles have erupted over this shared appointment power, with courts ultimately concluding that all parties intrinsically have a claim to this sort of executive power. With legislative leaders not having to face term limits, it means that the founders’ worries about leaders being able to abuse executive authority in North Carolina would have to include legislative leaders.
In that sense, chamber leadership positions should be restricted to the same extent as the governor. No individual member should serve more than four terms (eight years) in the position.
Unlike traditional term limits, leadership term limits would not restrict voters’ choices on their representatives within government. Leadership term limits would prevent only the stagnation of power and uphold the quicker rotation of office that the founders saw as healthy for legislative bodies.
For these reasons, the General Assembly should institute leadership term limits for the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore.