politics.nw is NeuraWeb's government transparency platform — cross-referencing voting records, donor lists, financial disclosures, and legislative outcomes in one place. We sat down with S. Vincent Anthony (vincent.nw), founder and CEO of NeuraWeb Global Inc., for a deep conversation on term limits, systemic corruption, and the full reform agenda that the data demands. This is not a left or right argument. It is an arithmetic argument.
NeuraWeb: Let's establish the baseline. Where do Americans actually stand on term limits?
Vincent: Thirty years of polling data is unambiguous. Depending on the survey and the year, 70 to 80 percent of Americans support congressional term limits — consistently, across party lines, across income levels, across geography. A 2023 Gallup survey put support at 74%. A 2024 McLaughlin poll put it at 87% when the question was framed around career politicians specifically.
This is not a polarized issue. It is one of the few things that Republican voters in rural Alabama and Democratic voters in urban California agree on by a margin that would be considered a landslide in any election.
The reason it hasn't happened is simple and worth stating plainly at the outset: the people who would vote to implement term limits are the same people who benefit from not having them. That is the entire explanation. Everything else — the procedural arguments, the constitutional questions, the experience debate — is downstream of that single fact.
NeuraWeb: Walk us through the data. What does congressional tenure actually look like right now?
Vincent: The numbers are more extreme than most people realize.
The average tenure of a sitting member of the House of Representatives is currently over 8.9 years. The Senate average is over 11.4 years. But averages obscure the real story at the extremes. As of this session, there are members of Congress who have served for 30, 35, 40-plus years. Don Young of Alaska served 49 years before his death in 2022. Patrick Leahy served 48 years in the Senate. Steny Hoyer served 43 years in the House. Richard Shelby served 44 years between the House and Senate combined.
These are not anomalies. They are the product of a system specifically engineered to protect incumbents. Incumbents in House races win re-election at a rate that has averaged over 90% for the last three decades. In 2022 it was 94.5%. The structural advantages of incumbency — name recognition, donor relationships, franking privilege, staff resources, gerrymandered districts — make unseating a sitting member the exception rather than the rule.
The result is an institution whose members are, on average, radically unrepresentative of the population they govern. The median age of the current Congress is 58 years. The median age of the American population is 38 years. The percentage of Congress members who are millionaires is approximately 54%. The percentage of Americans who are millionaires is approximately 8%. These gaps have widened, not narrowed, over time.
NeuraWeb: Let's go to the wealth data. This is where the numbers become genuinely difficult to explain.
Vincent: The congressional salary is $174,000 per year. That is a good income — top 5% of American earners. It is not, by itself, a path to extraordinary wealth accumulation. And yet.
The median net worth of a member of Congress is approximately $1.02 million — which already represents a significant premium over the American median of approximately $192,700. But the trajectory is what matters. Studies tracking congressional wealth over time show consistent, significant accumulation during service that salary alone cannot explain.
Mitch McConnell entered the Senate in 1985. His disclosed net worth at that time was approximately $3 million. His most recent disclosure shows a net worth of approximately $34 million. His Senate salary over 40 years totals approximately $6.5 million before taxes. The gap between what salary explains and what the disclosure shows is approximately $24 million.
Nancy Pelosi's net worth has grown from approximately $14 million when she became Speaker in 2007 to approximately $135 million today. Her husband Paul Pelosi's investment portfolio has consistently outperformed the market in ways that align uncomfortably with her committee assignments and legislative activity. In January 2021, Paul Pelosi purchased $5.3 million in Nvidia call options. Weeks later, the CHIPS and Science Act — which Nancy Pelosi helped shepherd through Congress and which directly subsidized semiconductor manufacturers including Nvidia — passed. The trade was legal. It was disclosed. And it produced a return that would not have been predictable without knowledge of the legislative timeline.
This is not selective. The data is bipartisan. Representative Brian Mast of Florida purchased stock in a pharmaceutical company days before a Medicare drug pricing vote. Senator David Perdue of Georgia made over 2,900 stock trades during his single Senate term — more than any other senator — including purchases in companies that appeared before his committees. Senator Richard Burr sold between $628,000 and $1.7 million in stock in February 2020 after receiving a classified Senate Intelligence Committee briefing on the emerging COVID-19 pandemic — before the market collapse that followed public awareness of the virus.
Burr was investigated. The Justice Department closed the investigation without charges. The STOCK Act — passed in 2012 to address congressional insider trading — requires disclosure within 45 days of a trade. The penalty for non-disclosure is $200. For a member of Congress trading on information that would be criminal for a private citizen to act on, the enforcement mechanism is a $200 fine and a disclosure form.
NeuraWeb: The donor-to-legislation correlation. This is the one that people sense but rarely see documented clearly.
Vincent: The academic literature on this is substantial and consistent. A landmark 2014 Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed 1,779 policy outcomes over 20 years and found that the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups had a statistically significant impact on policy outcomes, while the preferences of average citizens had near-zero independent impact.
Near zero. That is not a partisan finding. That is a peer-reviewed quantitative analysis of two decades of American policy.
The mechanism is documented at the transaction level. The pharmaceutical industry spent $374 million on lobbying in 2022. That same year, Congress passed legislation that included drug pricing reform significantly weaker than what 80% of Americans supported. The specific provisions that were weakened tracked almost precisely with the lobbying priorities of the pharmaceutical industry's top donors.
The defense industry spent $146 million on lobbying in 2023. The defense budget passed that year was $886 billion — $28 billion more than the Pentagon requested. The additional spending was heavily concentrated in weapons systems and platforms that the military had explicitly said it did not need, manufactured in the districts of the appropriations committee members who added them.
The financial services industry spent $672 million on lobbying between 2017 and 2020. The regulatory rollbacks of the Dodd-Frank Act that occurred during that period — including raising the threshold at which banks were subject to enhanced oversight from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets — tracked with the industry's documented legislative priorities. The banks that benefited most from those rollbacks included Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in 2023 in a failure that regulators later concluded was facilitated by reduced oversight requirements.
These are not coincidences. They are the system operating as the incentive structure demands. Money flows to legislators who produce favorable outcomes. Legislators who produce favorable outcomes receive more money. The cycle compounds over time — which is why long-tenured legislators accumulate both more donor relationships and more wealth than their shorter-serving counterparts.
NeuraWeb: Let's go to the experience argument. It's the strongest counterargument to term limits. How do you engage it honestly?
Vincent: The experience argument is legitimate in the abstract and I want to engage it seriously because it deserves serious engagement.
A legislator who has spent 20 years working through the intricacies of defense appropriations, or international trade law, or the regulatory structure of the financial system, genuinely knows things that a freshman legislator does not. Policy is complex. The unintended consequences of legislation are real. The learning curve is steep. There is a legitimate argument that institutional knowledge and procedural expertise have value — and that term limits would destroy that accumulated expertise and push power toward unelected staff, career bureaucrats, and lobbyists who face no term limits whatsoever.
I take that argument seriously. And then I ask: experience at what?
The expertise that accumulates over three decades in Congress is not primarily policy expertise. What senior legislators are dramatically better at is raising money, navigating the donor landscape, and using procedural knowledge to protect their position and advance their relationships. The experience that compounds over long tenure is the experience of the corrupt system — not the experience of governing well.
And if experience produced better legislation, we would expect to see evidence of it in outcomes. The United States Congress is one of the most experienced legislative bodies in the democratic world by average tenure. It has produced $36 trillion in national debt. A healthcare system that costs twice what comparable nations spend for worse outcomes. Infrastructure ranked 13th globally. A tax code of approximately 75,000 pages that disproportionately benefits the already-wealthy. The experience argument would be compelling if the experienced legislators were producing excellent outcomes for the country. The documented record is that they are producing excellent outcomes for their donors.
NeuraWeb: The lobbying pipeline. The revolving door. How does post-service employment corrupt the incentive structure even before someone leaves office?
Vincent: In 2022, 57% of retiring members of Congress went on to work as lobbyists or in lobbying-adjacent roles. The average salary increase in that transition is significant — a former committee chair earning $174,000 in salary can command $2 to $5 million annually as a lobbyist because what they are selling is access and relationships built during their public service.
Current law requires a two-year cooling off period before a former member can directly lobby their former colleagues. This restriction is widely considered ineffective because it applies only to direct lobbying contact, not to strategy, consulting, fundraising, or any of the other activities through which former members monetize their relationships.
But the more important effect of the revolving door is what it does to behavior before retirement. A legislator who is considering a post-service career in the industry they regulate — which is a rational consideration for anyone approaching the end of their congressional tenure — has a direct financial incentive to maintain favorable relationships with that industry during their service. They are, in effect, auditioning for their next job while writing the rules that govern it.
NeuraWeb: Let's build the full reform agenda. What does the complete structural fix look like?
Vincent: Term limits are necessary but not sufficient. I want to be honest about that. Term limits alone, without the accompanying reforms, would in some ways make things worse — accelerating the revolving door, increasing the power of staff and lobbyists who face no limits, and shortening the time horizon within which legislators could be held accountable by their constituents.
The full agenda has five components that work together as a system.
Component one: Term limits. Twelve years maximum — two six-year Senate terms or six two-year House terms, or any combination that totals twelve years. Long enough to develop genuine expertise. Short enough to prevent the entrenched donor dependency that defines the current system. It mirrors the term limits that apply to the President and that the Founders' vision of citizen governance implies.
Component two: Campaign finance structural reform. Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited independent expenditure in elections. Total spending in federal elections went from approximately $3.5 billion in the 2008 cycle to over $16 billion in the 2020 cycle. Dark money — spending by nonprofit organizations not required to disclose their donors — went from negligible to approximately $1 billion per cycle. The path forward: full and immediate disclosure requirements for all political spending, public financing options that allow candidates to compete without large donor dependency, and aggregate contribution limits that are constitutionally defensible.
Component three: Insider trading enforcement with real teeth. The STOCK Act of 2012 has been rendered ineffective by a $200 penalty that is not a deterrent for a legislator trading on information worth millions. The fix: mandatory blind trusts for all financial holdings exceeding $50,000 upon taking office, criminal referral for trading on non-public legislative information, real-time disclosure rather than 45-day disclosure, and enforcement by an independent body rather than the Justice Department.
Component four: Post-service employment restrictions with actual enforcement. The two-year cooling off period must become a lifetime ban on direct lobbying of the legislative branch by former members. A former senator should not be able to spend their public service building relationships at taxpayer expense and then monetize those relationships by selling access back to the institution. The ban should extend to any compensated activity that leverages legislative relationships — not just direct lobbying contact as currently defined.
Component five: Mandatory financial disclosure in machine-readable format with independent verification. Current disclosures are filed in PDF format, often handwritten, with ranges rather than specific values, and with no independent verification. The fix is XBRL-format machine-readable disclosure — the same standard required of public companies — with specific values rather than ranges, filed within 48 hours of any transaction, and subject to independent audit by the Government Accountability Office.
These five components work as a system. Term limits create urgency and reduce the time horizon for donor dependency to compound. Campaign finance reform reduces donor leverage. Insider trading enforcement removes the financial incentive to exploit legislative access. Post-service restrictions remove the auditioning-for-next-job incentive. Transparent disclosure makes the full picture visible to the public that politics.nw is built to inform.
NeuraWeb: The constitutional question. What's the path to actually implementing term limits?
Vincent: The Supreme Court ruled in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton in 1995 that states cannot impose term limits on federal legislators. The path is a constitutional amendment — two-thirds of both chambers of Congress or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, followed by ratification by three-quarters of states.
The conventional wisdom is that this is impossible because Congress will never vote to limit its own tenure. That conventional wisdom has been largely correct for thirty years. But it is not immutable.
The Article V convention route is less impossible than it appears. The Convention of States Project had passed resolutions in 19 states as of 2024. The political dynamics of state legislatures are meaningfully different from Congress — state legislators are closer to their constituents, face stronger term limit cultures in many states, and have less accumulated donor dependency.
The electoral path is replacing enough members of Congress with candidates who have made a binding pre-election commitment to term limit legislation. The way to make that commitment enforceable is through the transparency infrastructure that politics.nw is building — making it immediately visible to constituents when a member who pledged term limit support votes against it, cross-referenced with the donor relationships that explain the reversal.
I am not going to tell you this is easy. I am going to tell you it is necessary — and that the reason it hasn't happened is not that it's constitutionally impossible. It's that the people who would need to make it happen are the people who benefit most from the current system. That is a political problem, not a legal one. Political problems are solved by an informed and activated citizenry. That is what politics.nw exists to build.
NeuraWeb: Last question. "Not left. Not right. Just awake." Why is term limits specifically a non-partisan issue?
Vincent: Because the corruption it addresses is genuinely non-partisan. The mechanism of donor dependency, revolving door employment, insider trading, and wealth accumulation through public service operates identically on both sides of the aisle. The data does not show a partisan skew. It shows an incumbency skew.
The legislators who have accumulated the most wealth during their service, who have the most documented trading activity around their committee assignments, who have the most entrenched donor relationships — are disproportionately the longest-serving members of Congress. Those long-serving members are distributed across both parties. This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a career politician problem.
Politics.nw exists to make the data visible in a format that does not require partisan interpretation. The financial disclosures are public record. The voting records are public record. The donor lists are public record. The net worth trajectories are public record. What has been missing is a place where all of it is cross-referenced, searchable, and readable by a citizen who has 10 minutes and a genuine interest in understanding what their representative is actually doing.
When your representative's donor list is three clicks from the bill they just voted on — and when you can see that the bill's specific provisions match the lobbying priorities of those donors with a precision that strains coincidence — you don't need a political scientist to tell you what happened. You can see it. And when enough people can see it, clearly, in real time, without editorial spin, the conditions for accountability change.
We are not the opposition. We are the flashlight. And we are building it in Cape Coral, Florida, one data point at a time.
politics.nw is accessible at neuraweb.io/politics.nw. The platform cross-references voting records, donor lists, financial disclosures, and legislative outcomes — public data, made legible, without spin.
