Term Limits
By: Jason Hastings
Our presidents, many governors and some mayors have term limits. Why? We know that multiple re-elections will poison a person and turn them into a self-server. He or she will have too much power and start making bad decisions. They will place themselves and their next re-election ahead of the people they are serving. If this makes sense then why don’t we have term limits for our legislators? (Lifetime appointments of federal judges are another bad idea that can be discussed at a later date.)
When we are first thinking about term limits it is helpful to think in terms of local governments. The state and federal government are just too large for most of us to comprehend. Your local city government is a good microcosm of what happens at every level. Would you want the same people voted over and over again on your city council? (City councils typically wield the power in a council-mayor type of government). What would happen? They would create a political machine that serves their purposes instead of the city’s. They would appoint cronies to run city departments who would in turn select buddies to staff most of the positions. The city government would grow and more city workers would be hired. Anybody who wanted a city job would have to toe the party line. Free speech would be stymied as outsiders with new ideas are not allowed in. The performance of the city would suffer. There would be no impetus for a city worker to perform above the minimum level of their job unless they were bribed.
The same thing happens in our national government except they don’t call it bribery. They call it pork barrel spending and earmarks to the tune of billions of dollars annually. The professional politicians in our congress who are elected term after term rule the nation with little regard for the voters. They are consumed with doing what it takes to become reelected and payback those who are helping them. Any laws they pass tend to grow the size of the government and/or reward their supporters with more earmarks and pork. They are no longer beholden to the voters, they respond to lobbyists. The problem has become so bad that even the republicans who came to Washington with the promises of smaller government and fewer taxes have been seduced. They might have wanted to do the right thing at one point but they have become assimilated. The power is too intoxicating and they are incapable of stopping it.
The need for term limits did not occur to our Founding Fathers. They did not believe that someone would want to become a professional political parasite. They visualized a Congress made up of congressman and senators who would give up a few years of productive private life to serve their civic duty and then return to the private sector, voluntarily replaced by others. A small cadre of bureaucrats would be in place to bridge the turnover and help run a smooth ship. These original public servants did not receive much pay, had few perks and worked behind the scenes. But over the last 225 years these public servants have turned into self-serving leeches. They have become highly paid (above and below the table) self-important power hungry publicity seeking scoundrels. They serve themselves, their contributors and the government. Every once in a while they dangle a carrot to the voters.
They have created a self-serving system that swallows up the idealistic newcomer and turns them into monsters. The rare newcomer arrives in Washington DC campaigning as an outsider (they all do) who is ready to make changes. They soon realize that the system is so complex that they must compromise to make some change. If they want to make further changes they realize that they must rise within the political machine. This causes them to further abandon their original principles. They become entrenched and lose all idealism as they concentrate on using the system to maintain the power that they accumulated. Their original idealism is long forgotten. Dismissed as naiveté.
As they become ensconced in Washington they come down with a case of Potomac Fever. They feel the need for new legislation for every public problem. Their egos are stroked as they solve all of society’s problems while at the same time conveniently gathering more political power with the growth in government. As the size of the government grows more lobbyists rush to Washington DC in order to get a piece of the pie. They pay congressman millions of dollars in legal campaign contributions and illegal bribes. The congressmen will tell you what you want to hear to get through the next election but their real allegiance goes toward their contributors.
The congressmen then use a number of perks to help them get re-elected (Free mail, a taxpayer provided professional staff, free publicity, the list is myriad.). Since that isn’t always enough, they help fashion laws at the state level to help. The most startling of these laws is probably gerrymandering. Political parties at the state level draw congressional boundaries in order to help their peers stay elected. These boundaries are not related to geographical features or even postal zones. They are hand-tailored drawings that resemble Rorschach prints used to guarantee that the voters represent the legislator, not vice-versa. So, in essence, the legislators are selecting their voters. These districts are so safe that reelections are almost foregone conclusions. Voters see little impetus to get out and vote. That is why we barely get a 50% voter turnout. The incumbents are so safe that it takes the entire resources of the national political parties to unseat one congressman from the other party. This means more money needs to be raised, and that means more favors are owed.
We must be protected from out-of-control politicians and they must be protected from themselves. Term limits will do this and it will also bring out more voters. The size of government should shrink (or at least, stop growing), and corruption on the scale of a Rep. Randy Cunningham would be less likely. Critics of term limits state that there are already term limits built into our system at Election Day. But the incumbents have crafted a system that has created 90% re-election rates. Please vote. Dump the incumbents.
Something Ain’t Right
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