Term Limits: Paying to Overstay

Carolina Democrat Mike McIntyre sought re-election last year, he broke a pledge he made when he first ran in 1996 to serve no more than six terms. But voters in his Wilmington-centered House district hardly held it against him: He crushed Republican Will Breazeale by 38 percentage points.

Breazeale, an AirTran Airways pilot and Army Reserve major, is back, this time with a gimmick he hopes will get voters' attention: He promises to serve no more than three terms, and if he breaks the pledge, he says he'll donate $250,000 to charity.

Last month Breazeale ceremoniously handed a promissory note and a $250,000 check to a representative of Kids Voting USA, which runs simulated elections for children to encourage good citizenship. The note was drafted by the Alliance for Bonded Term Limits, a North Carolina group that's trying to revive the moribund term-limit movement of the 1990s. The movement's problem is that voters don't seem to care about term limits. J.C. Watts Jr., an Oklahoma Republican who served four terms in the House after promising to serve only three, wrote recently in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that 68 of the 73 lawmakers who took pledges before the 1994 election -- when term limits were part of the Republicans' Contract with America -- broke them.

"It has not had a good history," acknowledges Walter B. Bull Jr., president of the bonded term-limits group. But Bull says he and the group's founder, businessman John Skvarla, believe term limits would check power's corrupting influence. "I believe that fresh blood in the system has more value than long-term experience," Bull said.

Breazeale's big problem is that he remains a big-time underdog. McIntyre, who for now is a safe bet for yet another term in 2010, says that absent a constitutional amendment, "It is patently unfair to penalize some congressional districts or states by limiting the terms of our representatives.