The same people have been in Washington for decades, and they’re not leaving.

The honest situation

The math is the problem.

House incumbents who seek reelection win at very high rates - in 2024, about 95 percent of them won nationwide. The people who would have to vote on a term-limits amendment are the people term limits would remove. A federal amendment needs either two-thirds of both chambers of Congress or applications from 34 states to propose it, plus 38 states to ratify. Anyone promising federal term limits in two years is ignoring the political reality of that math.

That doesn’t mean the fight isn’t worth having. It means we have to be honest about what can actually move, and at what level. The disruption doesn’t come from one new bill. It comes from changing the political environment in which every candidate has to operate. That work starts now, in this campaign, in 17 counties, and it doesn’t require Congress to act first.

My pledge

Per office, per clock.

The standard term-limits proposal treats all federal office as one career timer. Mine doesn’t. The jobs are different - a House member representing 760,000 people in TN-5 is doing different work than a Senator representing seven million Tennesseans. Each role gets its own clock. If I want to keep serving, I have to prove it by running for something harder.

This is one of six planks in the pledge. Every federal candidate in the country gets asked, on the record, whether they’ll sign the full document.

What I’ll do federally

Use the seat for the messaging fight.

I can’t pass an amendment as one freshman. I can use the seat to make every other member of Congress take a position publicly, every cycle, on the record.

• Cosponsor every federal term limits bill that comes through.
• Sign every discharge petition.
• Vote for every floor resolution.
• Push leadership publicly to bring resolutions for floor votes - and name them when they refuse.
• Connect to the existing Article V infrastructure. Tennessee passed HJR5 in the state House in March 2023 and the state Senate in April 2024 - a resolution applying for an Article V national convention to propose a term-limits amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The campaign to use Article V is partially in motion. A federal candidate engaged in that fight is not starting from zero.

What I’ll do at the state and local level

The political mechanism that doesn’t need Congress.

The Supreme Court’s 1995 decision in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton ruled that states can’t add qualifications for federal office beyond what’s in the Constitution. A binding state-level congressional term-limit law is not available. The legal door is closed.

The political door isn’t. Organized voter expectation is its own form of enforcement, and it doesn’t need a court.

• The candidate pledge. A written pledge any candidate for federal office in Tennessee can sign, committing to serve no more than 12 years in Congress. No legal force. A statement of personal commitment voters can hold candidates accountable to in the next election. Refusing to sign is the choice that costs candidates politically, because they have to explain to voters why they want the option to stay longer.
• The voter pledge. Voters in TN-5 commit not to vote for any federal candidate who refuses to sign the 12-year pledge. Collected county by county across the 17 counties. Total count published transparently on the campaign website alongside the financial disclosures. Fifty thousand pledges across the district is a political fact every other Tennessee federal candidate has to respond to.
• Advisory referenda on county ballots. Tennessee law on local referenda is more restrictive than many states - ballot questions generally require specific statutory authority. Some Tennessee local governments may be able to pursue nonbinding advisory questions where state law or local authority allows, but this would need county-by-county legal review. Where it’s allowed, the question would read something like: “Do you support a 12-year term limit for members of the United States Congress representing Tennessee?” A 75-percent yes vote in any county becomes a public, county-level number every Tennessee candidate has to answer to.
• Push Tennessee’s Article V resolution forward. Tennessee already passed HJR5 (House March 2023, Senate April 2024). Pressure neighboring states to pass their own. 34 states needed.

What I’ll push at the party level

The Tennessee Democratic Party has its own lever.

The party could pursue this through its bylaws, endorsement rules, or internal candidate-support standards, subject to party rules and election law. TNDP could decline to endorse federal candidates who have served more than 12 years in the same seat. Same logic for state legislative endorsements. The mechanism would build TNDP endorsement into a credibility marker voters can track.

The same lever applies to the candidate pledge. TNDP could require every endorsed federal candidate to sign the 12-year pledge as a condition of endorsement. None of this requires state or federal legislation. It does require the party to choose to use the lever it already has.

The pushback I’m ready for

“Term limits is too slow. Voters want immediate action.”

This is the most common pushback the campaign will get, and it comes from well-meaning people who have absorbed the dominant strategic orthodoxy in Democratic politics. The orthodoxy is wrong, and articulating exactly why is one of the most important political arguments this campaign can make.

Republicans have been thinking in decades since the 1970s. The Federalist Society, Heritage, the network of state policy organizations, the legal academy pipeline - all of it has been built patiently over 50 years to deliver the Supreme Court that overturned Roe, the state legislatures that passed voter suppression, the redistricting that produced the gerrymander I’m running inside. They executed the plan. They won.

Democrats during the same period have been chasing immediate wins. Healthcare through the ACA, which Republicans have been working to dismantle since the day it passed. Climate policy through executive orders, which the next Republican president reverses. Many of the major policy wins Democrats have delivered over the past 40 years have proven vulnerable to rollback when political power changes hands. The Republican long-term wins are structural and durable. They outlast administrations.

This is why the term-limits fight has to come first. Every other reform on this list is built on the assumption that the people in office today will move on, and they won’t unless something forces it.

The other pushback

“Term limits strips Congress of institutional knowledge.”

If a member of Congress can’t figure out how to write a bill and get it passed within 12 years, the member is not good at the job. Twelve years is six full House terms. That is more than enough time to develop substantive expertise in a policy area, build the relationships required to move legislation, and deliver concrete results. Members who cannot do that in 12 years are not held back by lack of time.

Institutional knowledge in the favorable sense is learning how the place works. Institutional knowledge in the unfavorable sense is becoming part of how the place works - the donor networks, the lobbying ecosystem, the procedural deals. Term limits force regular turnover, which prevents the second kind of institutional knowledge from accumulating without preventing the first kind from being passed on through staff, committee structures, and shorter institutional memory.

Tradition is what people with little imagination invoke when they cannot defend the substance of the status quo. The defense of long incumbency on institutional-knowledge grounds is a defense of incumbency for its own sake.