[jacobolus]

In my opinion Dianne Feinstein is terrible compared to alternative politicians CA might elect to the job, but if you live in CA or one of the other states with state-level term limits and you think they are a good idea, you haven’t been paying attention. Pretty much everyone involved in state politics is unhappy with the results of the term limits imposed for the past 10 years (in CA they were enacted in 1990, but legislators didn’t start getting term limited out for a while).

They don’t prevent people from becoming a “career politicians”, they just make it so that the career is less predictable or stable: new careerists are constantly being churned up from local politics and put into important committee chair jobs (etc.) where they have no relevant competence or experience, the top legislative leaders only last for a couple years, and the most experienced legislators get dumped out the top, often to become paid lobbyists. This encourages short-term legislation including bills mashed together that don’t make sense. Civility/comity is undermined, because legislators don’t need to keep working together years into the future.

To compensate legislators have to lean a lot more on their staff (who are the only people around with some clue about the context). The executive branch gains power at the expense of the legislature, because (a) executive officials are often more experience, (b) the executive can outlast an uncooperative legislative leadership by just waiting a couple years, (c) term-limited legislators have a more precarious career and might be looking for an appointment to a next job.