Congressional Term Limits

If such an election were held right now, 59% of the people would vote to turn out both houses of congress in their entirety.

I’d certainly vote for it. To be sure, unless the question were carefully worded, all the guilty culprits would be at the top of their respective ballots in the next election, and the next congress would likely look a lot like the one we just threw out.

The only real solution to this is congressional term limits. This requires a constitutional amendment to accomplish, and guess where such an amendment has to originate? Right. Only the foxes can propose changes to the security of the henhouse. Firm Wikipedia, this summation of article 5 of the constitution:

Main article: Article Five of the United States Constitution

Article Five describes the process necessary to amend the Constitution. It establishes two methods of proposing amendments: by Congress or by a national convention requested by the states. Under the first method, Congress can propose an amendment by a two-thirds vote (of a quorum, not necessarily of the entire body) of the Senate and of the House of Representatives. Under the second method, two-thirds of the state legislatures may convene and "apply" to Congress to hold a national convention, whereupon Congress must call such a convention for the purpose of considering amendments. To date, only the first method (proposal by Congress) has been used.

The last time this came anywhere close to happening was when the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed. It made it through the congress, but when placed as a ballot item in the several states, it failed to get the requisite support.

The device of the states demanding a convention is a powerful threat, and was used in the case of the 17^th amendment which provided for direct election of Senators, turning the Senate into an even more exclusive version of the House.

Since it is unlikely that the congress will vote term limits on itself voluntarily, the demand for a convention seems to be the only realistic approach to the problem. The other problem is that the request for a convention must come from the state legislatures in the form of a resolution, asking that the convention be called. As of right now, not many state legislatures have term limits, and the members in states with, in effect, lifetime tenure for elected officials, are not going to demand that the federal government be so limited lest the voters decide that perhaps this should be applied to the local crooks as well.

This being the case, the only way we’ll ever get congressional term limits, is to first impose them on ¾ of the states first. Currently only 15 states have functioning term limits on their legislators.

At least 38 states must have them before we can realistically expect to be able to see congressional term limits, so I’m not holding my breath on this one. There needs to be citizen initiatives to put term limits on the ballot in 23 states that currently don’t have them before we can get anywhere with this. At this point, a policy of actively culling the herd seems to hold more promise. Like my bumper sticker says:

Limit Terms: Declare politicians a game species.

Alas, the Fish and Game dept has not yet established a season.