In brief: Two recent national polls, a year apart and from different pollsters, both find term limits for Congress backed by more than three-quarters of Democrats and more than four-fifths of Republicans. A constitutional amendment to do it has been introduced in the current Congress. It has not moved, for the same reason every version has failed since the only floor vote on the idea, in 1995: a constitutional amendment needs two-thirds of Congress to vote against its own members’ careers, and it has never come close.
The Question
The current proposal, House Joint Resolution 12, would amend the Constitution to limit representatives to three two-year terms and senators to two six-year terms. It would not count time served before ratification, so no sitting member would be term-limited immediately.
A separate, related idea, setting a maximum age for congressional candidates, is often polled alongside term limits and sometimes reported as one combined figure, but it is a distinct policy with its own separate mechanism and its own separate support numbers, given below. Neither idea is currently the subject of a bill that has cleared committee in either chamber.
Where Majorities Agree
McLaughlin & Associates, polling for the advocacy group U.S. Term Limits, surveyed 1,000 voters nationally January 22 to 27, 2025. Support for congressional term limits came to 79 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans, with independents at 85 percent.
An NPR, PBS News, and Marist poll of 1,322 adults, conducted April 27 to 30, 2026, with a margin of error of 3.1 points, asked the same question independently of any advocacy group. It found 78 percent of Democrats and 89 percent of Republicans in favor, with independents at 84 percent. The same poll asked separately about a maximum age for candidates: 78 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of Republicans, and 79 percent of independents supported that too, a slightly smaller Republican margin than for term limits specifically.
Figures current as of September 4, 2026.
Where Agreement Breaks Down
The two polls above measure support for term limits as a concept. They do not test a specific length, and the length is where competing proposals have always diverged. HJR 12 caps representatives at three terms and senators at two. The one version that ever got a House vote, in 1995, would have allowed six House terms and two Senate terms, twice as long. Neither the 2025 nor 2026 poll asked whether support would hold at a stricter or looser number.
Non-retroactivity is another point polling does not reach. Every version on the table, including HJR 12, only starts counting years served after the amendment takes effect. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Senate sponsor of the current companion resolution, won a third Senate term in 2024 while backing a bill that would not term-limit him until 2036. That is simply how the bill is written, not a claim about his motives, but it illustrates why “when does the clock start” is a real design question separate from the underlying concept.
The age-cap and term-limit questions are also often blurred together in coverage, even though they are separate proposals with separate mechanisms: one caps how old a candidate can be, the other caps how long a member can serve once elected. The May 2026 Marist poll found a real, if modest, gap between them among Republicans, 89 percent for term limits versus 83 percent for age caps, suggesting the two ideas are not simply interchangeable shorthand for “new blood in Congress” even though they are frequently reported as a single sentiment.
Who Opposes It and Why
Then-Rep. Kendra Horn, an Oklahoma Democrat, laid out the standard opposing argument in a 2020 town hall: without incumbents who stick around long enough to master a policy area, power shifts to “powerful lobbyists and people with the money,” since unelected staff and outside interests are the ones who do not term out. Political scientist Sheila Kennedy has made a similar case more recently, pointing to research on state legislatures that adopted term limits, which found increased reliance on lobbyists and executive-branch staff for institutional knowledge, with little evidence that it reduced polarization.
A separate objection is procedural rather than substantive: opponents note that voters already have a term-limit tool available every election cycle, and that a constitutional cap simply removes a choice from voters rather than empowering them. Both arguments accept that entrenched incumbency has costs; they dispute that a hard cap is the right fix. Neither the McLaughlin nor the Marist poll asked respondents to weigh the concept against this specific tradeoff, the risk of shifting influence toward staff and lobbyists, before recording their support.
Why It Hasn’t Happened
Congress has only voted on this once. On March 29, 1995, as part of the House Republican majority’s “Contract with America,” the House considered four competing term-limit proposals in a single day. The most popular version, capping House members at six terms and senators at two, passed with a simple majority, 227 to 204, but fell 63 votes short of the two-thirds threshold a constitutional amendment requires. The vote did not split cleanly along party lines: 189 of 230 Republicans present voted yes, compared with 38 of 204 Democrats. Rep. Barney Frank, who led opposition among Democrats, said afterward that many supporters were “voting yes and praying no.”
No term-limits amendment has reached a floor vote in either chamber since. HJR 12 was introduced by Rep. Ralph Norman in January 2025 with an initial 29 co-sponsors; the sponsoring organization says it has since collected pledges of support from more than 140 members. It remains in the House Judiciary Committee with no hearing scheduled. Because it is a constitutional amendment, it would still need two-thirds of both chambers and ratification by 38 states within seven years even if it cleared committee.
U.S. Term Limits, the advocacy group behind the current push, is also pursuing a second, parallel route: since the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states cannot impose term limits on their own members of Congress by ordinary state law, the group is lobbying state legislatures to call an Article V constitutional convention instead, a path that bypasses Congress entirely but has never been used to amend the Constitution and raises its own unresolved legal questions about how such a convention would be run.
Comparative Reference
Mexico ran the opposite experiment for eight decades. From 1933 to 2014, its constitution banned any legislator from immediate reelection at all; every member of Congress served exactly one term and left. A 2014 reform reversed course, allowing deputies to serve up to four consecutive three-year terms and senators up to two six-year terms, roughly the 12-year ceiling similar to what HJR 12 proposes as a cap rather than a floor. Mexican reformers concluded that a strict one-term rule had backfired: since no legislator could ever face voters again, loyalty shifted from constituents to the party leadership that controlled future job placements, exactly the accountability problem term-limit critics warn a hard cap could recreate in the United States.
What does not transfer is the direction of the comparison. Mexico moved from zero consecutive terms toward a 12-year ceiling because zero was found to concentrate power in unelected party bosses. The American proposal starts from an uncapped baseline and moves toward that same 12-year ceiling to reduce incumbency, a different problem being solved by arriving at a similar number from the opposite side.
Related Links
- McLaughlin & Associates poll for U.S. Term Limits, January 2025
- NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, May 2026
- H.J.Res. 12 full text and status
- 1995 House term-limits vote coverage
- Sheila Kennedy on term-limits research
- Library of Congress summary of Mexico’s 2014 reform
Discussion Questions
- Did you know Congress once came within 63 votes of passing this?
- Does knowing the two polls didn’t test a specific term length change how convincing you find the 80-plus percent figures?
- Should the length be three House terms, six, or something else?
- Is Kendra Horn’s lobbyist-power argument a real risk or a rationalization?
- Should a term-limits amendment apply retroactively, counting years already served?
- Why do you think a proposal with this much public support has never gotten a second floor vote?
- Does Mexico’s experience with a one-term-only rule change how you think about the American proposal?
- Is “elections are already a term limit” a satisfying answer to term-limit advocates?
- Should age caps and term limits be treated as one policy or two, given they poll differently among Republicans?
- Imagine you are a first-term member of Congress asked to co-sponsor HJR 12. Would you sign on, and why?
