Lobbies and big corps could not get more powerful than they are now, heck big Pharma gets anything and everything it wants. Term limits would give the good guys a better opportunity to stay good guys. Just my obstinate opinion.
Here's how big pharma gets more powerful. The law regulating pharmaceuticals is massively complex - tons of federal and state regulations enacted by statute and by regulatory agencies and tort laws throughout all fifty states, some but not all of which are preempted by federal laws. The point is that it's messy and massively confusing, and it's changing all the time.
So when a pharma lobbyist shows up in Washington or in Austin to pursue his client's agenda, he's going to give a sob story about why big pharma needs some law changed to stack the deck further in their favor. He's going to be very convincing and lay out statistics and mountains of evidence of why he's right, and he's getting paid high six and low seven figures to be good at this. Who's going to know if he's being honest about a real problem that should be addressed or if he's full of crap? It's going to be somebody who knows the issue far, far beyond what your average person or even a very intelligent person knows.
And who is that going to be? It's going to be somebody who has a reason to study it on an in-depth level for many years. People become experts on things by necessity and usually by it being part of their job. Well, if you're a legislator, part of your job is learning policy issues inside and out and being assigned that task by leadership. Issues like pharmaceutical regulation aren't going to be learned in one or two terms. It's too complicated, especially with all the other issues that have to be addressed.
I'll give you a real example from my own experience. I worked at the Capitol in 1997, and a huge issue at the time was water resource management. Most members responded with, "Huh?" "What's that?" Nobody knew anything about it, but while everybody was talking about the usual cultural and social issues that are "sexy" and easy to haggle over, we weren't sure if we were going to have enough water over the next several years. Furthermore, nobody wanted to deal with it, because it was very complex and massively BORING.
But there was one guy who did, and he was exactly the kind of guy you would want to term limit out of office. His name was J.E. Buster Brown, a senator from Lake Jackson, who had been there 17 years. He was a slimy, establishment politician with a fancy office, and he had a reputation for being a bootie-slappin,' womanizing pig. But for whatever reason, he took an interest in water resource management for many years, and when it was time for that boring but massively important issue to be addressed, he was ready with an excellent reform bill. And when everybody in Texas turns on their tap and water comes out, they have that slimy MoFo to thank for it.
Another one. Remember when California deregulated its electricity and had all those blackouts and energy price spikes in the early 2000s and got their governor recalled? Ever wonder why Texas didn't have that even though we similarly deregulated? It's because when the Enron lobbyists were storming the state capital trying to get their way in the legislation, a House member named Steve Wolens (D-Dallas) had been there almost 20 years studying a massively complex issue well enough to know ******** when he saw it. Those are two examples I literally saw with my own eyes just by being a lowly aide at the Texas Capitol for 2 sessions. (California had term limits at the time, so they didn't have a Steve Wolens.)
You pass term limits, and you won't have guys who are as knowledgable on tough, complex stuff as Brown and Wolens were. What happens then? The lobby writes one-sided bills, and the legislatures mindlessly pass them (or in the case of water management, nobody does anything), and nobody knows there's a problem until a pharmaceutical company sends a dangerous drug or vaccine to the market and nobody can do anything about it because the laws passed by uninformed legislators protects them (or the water stops running). And that is how pharma, insurance, utilities, etc. can get worse.
