Term Limits

One of my facebook “friends” posted this on his wall and be the curious type I went and read it.

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/push-32-term-limit-law-3-terms-house2-terms-senate-change-people-change-debate/TJg8fxXf

I’m not against the idea of Term Limits but with something as intricate and confusing as the politics are in America, do we really want new folks being elected to run this country ever 6-12 years?

I shudder to think at the number of Bachmann’s that might get elected in such a situation. But I’m tempted to sign it anyway (not that it will change the system mind you… but at least for support).

So what does the electoral brain here in SD country think? Good, bad, even?

Personally, I’m all for term limits.

I think ‘new blood’ is a good idea. Yeah, you’d get a Bachmann here and there, but they’d be limited to how long they could fuck things up … and you’d do away with Senator Methuselah on his 25th term, talking into the machine and trying to sponsor bills to boost Green Stamps sales or some shit like that.

I’m against. I don’t really see what good it would do, our political system is amaturish enough without going out of our way to find more literal amateurs to put in it.

Plus I think it would incentivize politicians to suck up to rich interests as quickly and as shamelessly as possible, since they know that they’ll need a new job in a couple years, know they have limited time to suck up and impress contacts that can get them those jobs and know that even if they alienate voters, they won’t be able to use those voters to get re-elected more then once anyways.

I’m against them. We already have a mechanism in place to limit terms: regular elections. And yeah, I know the incumbent has all the advantages and wins most of the time, but there’s still the opportunity to boot him or her out every couple of years.

There are few enough GOOD politicians already, I hate to lose them just because they’re only allowed to serve two terms or whatever. It’s counterproductive.

Plus, having to face the voters for re-election makes the politicians more accountable to the voters. Like Simplicio said, office holders with no opportunity for re-election are not accountable to anyone except those they can profit from.

Agree with this. My sister the Tea Partier and term limit supporter says I’m too cynical. But as Lily Tomlin said…“No matter how cynical you get, you can never keep up!”

I recall an editorial cartoon from 1995 or so (after the “Contract With America” Republican midterm wins) – an elephant in a wedding tux, in a carriage with a “Just Married” banner, wearing an innocent “Who, me?” rolleyes expression, is kicking to the curb an astonished bride labeled “Term Limits.”

We’ve had term limits in the California legislature for a couple of decades now and, in my opinion, its been a disaster.

Sure, we get a lot of new blood all the time. But mostly these are inexperienced dumpkopfs who don’t know how the heck to run a government. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge about how to get things done shuttles from the Assembly to the State Senate, or vice-versa, until they are completely termed out.

As for the idea that term limits would reduce polarization, that’s the biggest laugh of all. Since the newbies have no history for the voters to look at, the only thing they can point to is their political party. So they act as partisan as possible. The legislatature has never been as polarized as it is now.

Maybe I’m a bit hypocritical, as I oppose term limits…except for the 22nd Amendment, limiting the President to two terms… I treasure the memory of FDR, but, really, he shouldn’t have… Hubris to think that only he could lead during WWII…

The arguments above tell the tale: term limits for representatives have led to more corruption, not to less! It’s as if they know they only have eight years to milk every dollar from the special interests, so they’ve got to go full tilt!

I may be a yellow-dog Democrat, but, in political science terms, I prefer a “republic” to a “democracy,” i.e., I like to have a level of buffering (okay, I originally typed “buggering”) between the representatives and the People. I think that direct democracy is a very scary form of government. If we must have term limits, can we also have longer terms, so that the representatives can be shielded from the need to be constantly campaigning?

I once thought that term limits but they’re not.

It makes parties more powerful and makes representatives more beholden to their party.

I would rather see proportional representation in congress and state legislatures.

For ages my Rep was Henry Hyde. Disagreed with much (all) of what he said, but he brought home the pork.

Most of which he ate.

With term limits in California (and I can confirm that suranyi’s opinion bears a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality), among other “unintended” consequences, the only people with the political savvy and experience to operate the levers of governance are lobbyists (and, to the degree that they are passed down from outgoing to incoming officeholders, legislative staffers).

The sharp-eyed observer will note that none of the above people are put into place by the electorate.

…SYNTAX ERROR…SYNTAX ERROR…SYNTAX ERROR

Abort, Retry, Reboot…

The California experience refutes the OP.

Also, it doesn’t discourage professional politicians. What happens is politicians hop from job to job, gathering experience in none of them. Furthermore, they refuse to make tough decisions, because they know they will have to fight a tough race in a new position in a few years.

Finally there is zero accountability. None. The legislature made some piss-poor decisions with electricity deregulation during the late 1990s for example: it bit the state in the ass around 2001. No politician paid any price: they had basically all term limited out.
If experience didn’t matter and term limits were such a wonderful idea, they would have them in the private sector.

Agreed. (Also, I agree with the rest of your post, snipped to save digital ink.)

Term limits are an emotional reaction to a set of very real problems. But “throw the bums out” doesn’t do anything when there is an endless supply of bums to replace them. Really no different than the “we need a business person to run this country like a business” or any of a dozen other bumper-sticker instincts people sign on to without good reason.

As to the OP, I am sympathetic to the desire for significant structural change. I supported the earmark ban, even though it was a meager part of the budget and only shifted the budget decisions to the executive, but if there’s some chance it shakes things up in a positive way, I’m interested. Term limits just don’t work.

Florida has had the same experience with term limits.

Inexperienced pols, rabid polarization, shameless pandering to money, and a refusal to make “short term pain, long term gain” decisions.

It also has the effect of marginalizing any rural areas of the state. North Florida has a relatively low population as opposed to South Florida, our counter-balance used to be that we had long-term pols that eventually gained some political power. Now, South Fl just does what they want and ignores the “few” North Florida votes.

Thanks all. I was actually not aware of term limits in FL and CA… but that does explain a lot. Consider my ignorance defeated for today at least.

We’ve decided we hate politics so much that it’s better to have paid lobbyists as the people who understand the legislative process.

Seriously, thanks to term limits, the lobbyists know what’s in a law better than the lawmakers. And I’m making a non-partisan slam. When I worked for an advocacy group, our policy director had worked in the field for 30 years and knew the ins and out of our particular “special interest.” Thanks to term limits, the only people in state government with as much knowledge were a few veteran “bureaucrats” whose jobs the legislators were constantly trying to eliminate.

The speaker of our state legislature once denied she was in the pocket of conservative special interests by pointing out that she had BOTH conservative and liberal interest groups on her speed dial. Is this really how we want to run our government?

Certainly, if she followed up with, “And I always get the opinions of both before making a decision.”

I say, if we are to have term limits, they should not be lifetime limits. I.e., you serve a term in Congress, you sit out a term, you can run for the same seat again next cycle. You and a friend in your own party might even simply, publicly agree to alternate in the office so long as your party holds the district. (In the interim, you might fill your time by holding some local office, or private-sector work.) That way the incumbency advantage is broken, which is the whole point of term limits; but, instead of a bunch of amateur “citizen legislators,” we always have a large pool of experienced legislative talent in office and out of office.

Not sure how much the incumbency advantage would actually be broken. Alabama’s requirement that the governor sit out one term between terms looked like it was being gotten around by the fact that Lurleen Wallace succeeded her husband George in the office. Had she not died during the term (and had George not been tooling up for his spoiler role in the 1968 Presidential election), they might have swapped it back and forth for years.