Yesterday, Republican Senators Jim DeMint, Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn and Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced S.J. Res. 21., legislation that would create a new amendment to the Constitution. The amendment would limit the number of terms any individual could serve in the Senate to just two, and the number of terms any individual could serve in the House of Representatives to just three.
That means that a Senate career could last only 12 years, and a career on the House could last only 6 years.
Some questions for consideration of this bill:
- What would the political advantage for the Republican Party be with this new arrangement?
- How would the amendment shift the balance of power between the three branches of government?
- Seniority would not be the criterion for committee leadership, so what would be?
- How would the role of big corporations and lobbying interests change with passage of the amendment?
- Would politicians become more or less beholden to their political party’s leadership?
- Would the amendment make it easier for candidates to run for Congress without spending large amounts of their own money, or would it make Congress even more exclusively a place for wealthy Americans to get elected to?
- Would this amendment increase or decrease accountability of politicians to voters?
I’d love that. 18 years in the senate is too long though.
Career politicians are the worst breed.
What are the best breed, in your opinion, then?
Can you explain the reason you support this amendment in some more detail?
99% of the people who go there go for a job, etc. The salary is about 200K a year plus benefits. They say anything and do anything to get reelected and keep their scam going. Dick Army famously said he was leaving congress so he could get rich as a lobbyist. If you get a leadership position, then the lobbyist want toy.
The career politician are the worst ones who start in politics at a young age, and then they somehow manage to get to the senate and it ends up like a retirement home.
This is excellent! I’ve been screaming for this for years and it took Republicans to get it going.
Why is it such a good idea? Becuase political office was NEVER meant to be a career. EVER! Term limits helps control corruption and fraud. There would be no shift of power, elections would run as always. Seniority would ride the wave as always and key individuals would float to the top as does in the military. Generals only serve in their positions for a couple to three years before retirement forces them out. The advantages are endless.
I’m basically in favor of these term limits. I would hope they word it in such a way that the Republicans who’re suggesting the limits would be prevented from running again — I think they’ve all been around quite a while. (K.B. Hutchinson’s site says she joined the senate in 1993.) Obviously they’d like to get the incumbent Democratic majority out of office ASAP, but I think we have the modicum of political sanity left in this country so as not to allow them to re-amend the constitution for unlimited terms next time the R’s get a majority.
There could be a slight shift of power away from the Congress which I suggest could be mitigated by having a limit on judicial branch service as well. Maybe a 15 year limit on any one federal bench plus a 20 year limit of combined service as a judge in any federal courts.
It would probably have little effect on the 2-party system and the cost of getting elected. There have been and will continue to be people who cycle through the positions of party leader, pundit, lobbyist, and public-office-holder in their political career. So they will just spend a bit less time in the office-holder phase or hold more offices.
Lobbying should be more difficult as there’s not as much return on the corporate investment in one politician and with more people to buy there are more opportunities for them to get caught. However, corporations are getting fairly good at taking their message directly to the people and making them vote against their own interests.
replace the federal gov by commom law it is the rights of all americans. the feds are no longer part of the american states ore people. when you see this and know it call me i will save the united states
Um, how are you going to save the United States, when you can’t even remember to leave us a telephone number to call you with? Telepathy?
i’m concerned that it isn’t going to matter now that we’re well on the road to being a police state. These clowns will be like machine gun bullets as opposed to single shots. They’ll be put up for election by our infamous duopoly system, yeah go ahead pick one – they’re both the same (or one is, on the surface, “better”, until elected), and once they’re in they get the visit from THE POWERS THAT BE telling them how it is and voila, the government does THEIR bidding with total disregard for the idiots that elected them. So much for the vaunted democratic system of government. It’s totally corrupted with corporate money and influence, from ward leaders to the national level, and expecting “progressive” legislation from them is totally naive. Go ahead, write, protest, call “your” representatives. Sit back and watch the results: same old, same old.
Isn’t that how Communism worked? It always worked for the “little guy.”
Let’s face it! We need the change!
The only infallible, unstoppable, guaranteed way to get a truly new Congress is :
NEVER REELECT ANY INCUMBENT! AND DO IT EVERY ELECTION!
Don’t let anyone serve more than one term. Some of the reasons to do this:
• It gives us a one-term-limited Congress without using amendments
• It encourages ordinary citizens to run for Congress
• It would be supported by 70% of the country who want term limits for Congress
• It is completely nonpartisan
• If repeated, it ends career politicians in Congress
• It opens the way to a “citizen Congress”
* It would open a torrent of fresh ideas to improve our government
• It ends the seniority system that keeps freshmen powerless
• It doesn’t cost money. But you MUST vote! Just don’t vote for an incumbent
• It is the only guaranteed, infallible, unstoppable way to “Throw the Bums Out”
• It takes effect immediately on Election Day
• If it doesn’t work, do it again and again! It will work eventually
NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS. AND DO IT EVERY ELECTION!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrAOe4w1zzw
nelson lee walker of tenurecorrupts.com
send for your free NEVER REELECT bumper sticker
OpenCongress.org has public support of this bill at 92%. I’m sure that’s not all Republicans in support. I’m as progressive as heck, but it sounds good to me. Here’s a couple of amendments I can think of:
1. Instead of campaigns, Senators and Congresspeople are selected by the same process as we select for jury duty. Registered voter, “of sound mind”, no good excuses not to participate, etc. That would fix the campaign finance problem, wouldn’t it?
2. If, after one term, the selected representative was a real dog, public referendum in their district would remove that person and start the jury selection process for a new one.
3. All the selected representatives would have to use a universally agreed upon set of tools for polling their constituencies on every bill, and would have to follow their majority’s collective “yea” or “nay” upon peril of being subjected to amendment 2 above.
4. This would necessarily replace traditional voting for a person with polling for a bill, so there would have to be a strict set of procedures and equipment for garnering such frequent polling, and sufficient transparency so that these polls could not be compromised, corrupted, etc., by powerful interest groups, corporations, etc.
There’s no reason why, in a high tech society such as ours, we could not establish a true “one man, vote” Democracy –something our Founding Fathers surely had to compromise on with representative democracy, because they lived in a horse and buggy, pre-electricity, pre- mass telecommunication, pre- computerized world.