I will not rely solely on the repeal of McCain-Feingold and my proposed DC relocation/rotation among the several states, Constitutional Amendment.

In concept, term limits might be a good idea. There are reasons why term limits were the ONLY item not enacted from the 1994 Contract with America. Over at AT, James Lewis mirrors the same commentary regarding appointments to boards and commissions:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/will_the_left_try_a_kamikaze_r.html

“So it’s not out of the question that the Democrats in the House and Senate will go for a kamikaze rush to push MediCoup through Congress as quickly as possible. It would not be difficult. Normal Americans think we can defeat the “Blue Dog Democrats” at the polls, and that is true. But Obama just has to pick up the phone and tell the Dogs he will guarantee them jobs even if they are defeated. How about Ambassador to Upper Slobbovia? How about a nice job in the Soros Empire? Or in the case of Leon Panetta, how about a university center named after you, and funded by the Feds to study, umm…the art of politics? For the real high flyers like Rahm Emanuel, there’s always a part-time job on the Board of Freddie Mac for several million bucks.”

Personally, I would be for some sort of “cannot serve more than 12 years or three terms consecutively (whichever is greater) in any one office”. So if someone wants to become a career politician, they can move from the House to the Senate. Additionally, even in this age of Obama, I firmly believe that there should be no term limits on the presidency unless Congress follows suit.

like San Antonio, but it doesn’t work well for the state as a whole. We don’t have the corruption that happened years and years ago. People really do vote with there feet and take care of politicians w/o having to worry about term limits. Overall things are great.

Through all the years of Democrat hegemony, they developed what is really a Fourth Sector in the American economy, “businesses” that exist to support and interact with government. I distinguish this Fourth Sector from the Third Sector of private businesses that do significant business with the government such as construction contractors, diversified defense contractors, etc.

Republicans simply have never developed the shadow government of non-profits, contractors, unions, and law firms that the Democrats have and which enable them to employ, even enrich, their operatives even when they’re out of power.

If, and I do mean if, we again have control of the federal government, we should dissassemble the Democrat shadow government with a machete. See my diary from a while back about feeding the hand that bites us. But, recall what happened with the Republican governors who wanted to resist “stimulus” money; they got rolled by their legislatures. The states are simply hooked on federal money so even where we have Republican control, we’re pumping out grants and contracts to people who hate us and who work every day for our demise and do so with tax dollars.

One of the things that has scared me the most about big government running amok is the breakdown between the will of the electorate and the votes of their representatives.

This phenomenon has fueled the tea parties, the town halls, the marches on Washington, DC and, importantly, the willingness of true conservatives to step forward and participate and run for office.

I wonder whether some cause of the disconnect between term limitation and fiscal restraints may not be discoverable by looking at what the officeholders do after they are term limited out. And, what is more easily discerned, what part of this disconnect is due to these representatives no longer fearing their constituents being able to fire them. It seems clear that where there exists a larger contingent of legislators who no longer fear the electorate, the will of the people will be largely ignored.

51. California
49. Florida
47. Arizona
42. Nevada
40. Ohio
38. Michigan

Interesting correlation: AZ, CA, FL, NV and MI are the five states that were hit hardest by the housing crash. Not only does this kill local tax revenue (property taxes), but all those foreclosed-upon folks are probably out of work, and not spending much on other things either — killing state AND local tax revenue (income tax and sales tax).

I know a lot of FL’s ills are due to growth in spending in the boom years (Thanks, Jeb and Crist), without commensurate cuts in spending when things got tough. Like now.

I find this argument against term limits less than persuasive. I agree that there comes a tipping point, when leftists are in power long enough, that they will have created these feathered nests for themselves. Large bureaucracies, tax-payer funded NGOs, etc — that’s what statists DO. And once they’ve done that, term limits are not going to help much.

But if you implement the term limits BEFORE that tipping point, you can keep replacing the elected knaves before they succumb to terminal governmentitis. Are we past the tipping point yet? I dunno.

I think Pilgrim nailed it: “The only thing that can address that problem is to get people back into power who will vigorously attack and shrink the growing size and power the government possesses.”

And to do THAT, we need to limit the advantages of incumbency, or at least its duration!

I wish I had more time to get exact info on it, but I’m going to have to work from memory here.

About 15 years ago, we passed term limits in MO. At the time we had an extremely corrupt speaker of the house (Griffith was his name I believe) who had been in the position for hundreds of years. Not enough legislators were willing to challenge him and he was able to punish anyone who did.

When we passed term limits, within a couple of years, the other legislators were standing up to him, even his own party. (Which was D naturally!) When we passed the limits, everyone in office was granted the full time, as if they had only just been elected.

That group had not even been limited out before he was in prison and we had all kinds of legislative reforms going on. Numerous ills were corrected just because the @%!#$%!$ knew they weren’t going to be there sucking on the public tit for the rest of their lives.

That doesn’t mean we don’t still have shenanigans. They are still politicians after all. And I know in theory, term limits are superfluous, as we have elections every two years. But in practicality, when those blankety-blank-blanks know that their time is short, they actually do act more like citizen legislators and less like pigs at the trough.

Now if we can just get rid of the MO plan for choosing judges, the people can be back in charge of our own gov’t.

thought that states with the term limits may be self selected in some way. In Illinois we have had so many worthless or worse governors, the people finally succeeded in pushing through a legislative resolution to get a constitutional amendment for the right of recall on the ballot in 2010. Had we not had to watch so many elected officials get indicted and convicted for wrongdoing, would there have been enough pressure to successfully lobby for a constitutional amendment to appear on the ballot? In the case of term limits, it could be that the people have been terribly wronged forever and felt they needed to resort to the law, and perhaps did it too late to effect change.

the presence of spendthrift politicians in the state is a function of the liberal/braindead voters and not the product of term limits.

Term limits (nationally) is a bad idea whose time has come because it is unwavering logic and fact that politicians who stay in DC the longest have the most power to get their way and put out more pork.

Just look at Robert Byrd. Even granted that the jug blowing idiots in West Virginia would always elect an evil grafter, if that grafter had less power, then there would ipso facto be less graft.

The 2 most feared words to the thugs in D.C. are “term limits”..the prob was it shoud have been 12 years…y know what ALL the indicted thugs had in common? They ALL had over 12 years in the congress.

Had I one simple wish to change the direction of this country…(besides photo Id and age 25 to vote) it would be 12 year term limits or age 80…whichever is 1st…the country is infected with these 30-40 year lying thieves that want to die at age 99 in office!

ALL arguments to the contrary ignore history…and current reality.
If you can’t impact America after 12 years in the congress…GO HOME.
Remember a democrat in congress took the TL case to court…no other group.