Clinton, GOP Appear to Trade Places on Value of Term Limits

WASHINGTON —  Three weeks after voters switched the majority and minority parties on Capitol Hill, leaders of the two parties sound as though they are switching sides on the wisdom of adding term limits to the U.S. Constitution.

Before the election, Republicans made term limits a key part of their agenda for changing Congress and promised to press a constitutional amendment within 100 days.

But last week, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a 16-year veteran, suggested that term limits should not apply to current lawmakers.

And key Republicans, including Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), who are expected to head the judiciary committees in the new Congress, said they would fight a proposed constitutional amendment as unwise and unnecessary.

On the other side, President Clinton is seeing new virtue in the idea, at least if it is applied to all lawmakers.

“The President doesn’t think there should be an escape hatch” for current incumbents, White House legal counsel Abner Mikva said Tuesday evening. “He has said all along that he doesn’t think it is a good policy, but if it’s important enough to do it, it should apply to everyone.”

White House officials said that they wanted to clarify Clinton’s position on term limits. They also clearly see a new political opportunity in hitting the Republicans with a club that has been used so often against Democrats.

“This was great campaign fodder for them,” Mikva said of the Republicans, but “you shouldn’t trivialize the issue by adding a grandfather clause” to exempt the current members of the House and Senate, he added. Before, as leader of the majority Democrats, Clinton hardly could have favored a measure that could have ousted the senior leaders of his party on Capitol Hill.

But as President, Clinton already has an eight-year term limit fixed in the Constitution, while his political opponents on Capitol Hill will now be long-term Republican members who control the House and Senate.

Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), slated to be majority leader, first came to Congress in 1961 as a House member and has served in the Senate since 1969. Gingrich was first elected to the House in 1978.