Poor ole Mike Madigan. The 83-year-old former speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, a.k.a. the Velvet Hammer, was just sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison, which means he’ll be spending his golden years in a federal penitentiary, instead of with his wife and family.

Madigan spent 50 years in the House, 36 of them as speaker, which gave him plenty of time to amass the power necessary to perform the grifts that landed him in the clink, such as arranging for no-show jobs for his friends at ComEd in exchange for passing legislation that allowed the utility to jack up rates. No bill passed the House without Madigan’s imprimatur. As head of the Illinois Democratic Party, statewide officials came begging for his endorsement. As fellow jailbird Rod Blagojevich put it, “When that guy, Madigan, was on the top of the mountain, they were all kissing his ass.”

But suppose Madigan hadn’t been allowed to spend most of his life in the state House. Suppose he’d been limited to 12 years in office. He would have been forced to retire in 1983, the same year he became speaker. Madigan would have gone back to his lucrative law practice, and today be a forgotten figure in state politics.

“I seriously doubt” Madigan would be going to jail if he’d been term-limited, says Representative Dan Ugaste, R-Geneva. Ugaste favors term limits of “no shorter than 12 years” for state legislators. “We can take that away from Speaker Madigan’s years and the fact that he ended up convicted in federal prison.”

In a 2012 poll by the Paul Simon Institute of Politics at Southern Illinois University, 78 percent of Illinois voters favored term limits for legislators.

“The founders never anticipated people who were going to stay a long time in the legislature,” said John Jackson of the Simon Institute. “They envisioned Cincinnatus, the citizen soldier. And, of course, people didn’t live that long back then — 45, 50, 55 years.”

So why haven’t term limits happened? Well, the voters have tried, but they’ve been thwarted by the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1994, a group calling itself Eight Is Enough collected enough signatures for a ballot measure limiting legislators to eight years in office. The Illinois Bar Association argued that the state constitution only allows amendments that concern the structure and procedure of the legislature. Term limits would have concerned the qualifications and eligibility for office, which must be resolved by legislators themselves. The court bought it. In 2014, candidate for governor Bruce Rauner bankrolled another term limits initiative, but that too was struck down by the courts.

Do you see the problem here? Only legislators, the group most interested in staying in office, can limit their own terms. That’s like asking the pigs at the Union Stockyard to vote on whether they want to be slaughtered. Politicians would argue that the voters themselves can impose term limits by voting out officeholders, but when most districts are drawn to elect the legislators who represent them, that’s not easy to do.

“Madigan was very adamantly against term limits,” said Austin Berg, executive director of the Chicago Policy Center for the Illinois Policy Institute, which favors term limits.

In the 16 states with term limits for legislators, the reform was passed by citizen initiative. Those states, though, have different constitutions than Illinois, which has no tradition of good government or voter participation in government.

There are, of course, arguments against term limits. Former Governor Jim Edgar opposed term limits because veteran legislators provided “institutional knowledge” of government, as opposed to governors, who come and go in a few years. Also, term limits are said to enhance the power of lobbyists, who are better paid and more experienced in the workings of government than newbie legislators.

“You don’t want your lobbyists with more knowledge than the novices you get every two to four years,” Jackson said.

(The Illinois legislature currently has a rule limiting legislative leaders to no more than 10 years in their posts. It was obviously instituted to prevent the emergence of another Madigan. But since it’s only a rule, which can be changed by a new legislature, some legislators want to see it added to the state constitution.)

Term limits would do a favor not just for the voters, but for legislators, too. Politics attracts people who want power, and the more power they get, the more they want. They begin to identify themselves with their offices, to believe that they can’t get along without the job, and worse, that the job can’t get along without them. In a democracy, there is no indispensable individual. Term limits would short circuit the endless grab for power that was ultimately Mike Madigan’s undoing.

“I think he started believing his own myth, that he was the Velvet Hammer, that he could tiptoe up to the line and not cross it,” Jackson said.

If Mike Madigan had been term limited, he wouldn’t have been as famous as he became, or as powerful, or as wealthy. But he’d be a free man.