Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, who is perhaps best known for her swing votes in the Oregon Senate, recently blasted President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to limit terms in Congress.

“If the outcome you desire is to make sure the lobby and the professional staff know everything and the Legislature knows nothing, enforce term limits and make these knowledgeable people with institutional history go away,” Johnson said during her weekly radio show Nov. 18.

Trump has proposed six-year term limits in the U.S. House of Representatives and 12-year term limits in the U.S. Senate. Time Magazine reported Thursday, Nov. 22, that the proposal would put 32 senators and 226 representatives out of a job.

“I subscribe to the theory that we have term limits already,” Johnson said. “They’re called elections.”

She noted that more than a quarter of the membership in the Oregon House of Representatives will be new in 2017, following the Nov. 8 election.

“We have this whole new crop of people, and they will be learning how the Legislature functions, how committees work, where the ladies’ room is, all of the sorts of things that you need to know in order to make the place function,” she said. “I’m getting to be one of the more senior people now, and I’m just learning where the bones are buried.”

Johnson served in the Oregon House for more than two terms before her appointment to the Oregon Senate, where she was promptly elected. She is working on completing her third term.

Her institutional knowledge may, in fact, be generational. Her father, the late Sam Johnson, served in the Oregon House in the 1960s and ‘70s.