I’m another California resident who can echo what has already been posted.
I think the root cause for term limits is the view of many people that being a legislator is not having a real job. All they see is the bloviating and the voting, they don’t see committee meetings and research and support for constituents. It is why some people have a fit when high level government officials - who command staff and budgets rivaling large corporations - get paid salaries of middle managers in industry.
Term limit for Steve Jobs? Terrible idea? For a senator? Great idea. Feh.
In Ohio, with term limits the longest serving politicians simply move to new positions. Termed out as a state rep? Run next as a state senator! When that is done, try for a state wide job, or one of the many elected court positions or county commissioner. In other words not so much new blood as any expected.
Where new people have moved in to the system, they have been highly polarized. The state has been gerrymandered to within an inch of its life. There is no need to ever move to the middle, most office seekers need only win the Republican primary. Nothing new, but now they have no incentive to work with the few Democrats, moderate Republicans, or anybody who disagrees with them. If you are only going to be in that position for couple of terms, why do you need to stockpile favors from anybody?
Plus, once term limits are in place, no matter how badly things go, nobody is going to realistically support removing them.
There is a common arrangement like this in Virginia, which has a single 4 year term limit on governors. If there’s an outgoing Democratic governor, they often run for mayor of Richmond, and the mayor runs for governor. You can ask Virginians how well that works out for them.
There will always be an incumbent advantage as they are known quantities. If the voters like what they have, they can keep it. Other advantages (fundraising, connections, etc.) should be tackled through targeted legislation, I think. For a start, public funding of elections would do wonders.
My current state representative has been in the General Assembly for 17 uninterrupted years. He’s switched houses now twice, since term limits expire after only four years. He’s already planning to run for his old Senate seat in 2014, 20 years after he was first elected to the House.
We’ve been spoiled. The Constitution set term limits. Two years for a Representative, six years for a Senator, four years for a President. They chose those limits because throughout history the limit for a term was always a lifetime. The Republicans fucked us by limiting the number of terms for a President at two and a half. This automatically makes a President a lame duck in his last term.
If any term limits provided in the Constitution are to be changed, the first change should be limiting the term of a Supreme Court Justice to less than a lifetime, and repealing the 22nd amendment.
I’m for time limits, whereby no one workd for the federal government for more than say 13 years. This would apply to anyone from the janitor at the Washington Monument to politicians. This would not only get rid of self serving politicians but to double and triple dippers.
Oh yeah, let’s get rid of the experienced scientists at the National Institutes of Health and replace them with kids right out of college. That seems like a great idea.
Just the first problem with this idea that popped into my head.
Besides which, some government jobs don’t really have private-sector equivalents. The vast majority of researchers in this country get paid primarily by some branch or another of the federal government.
This has always been my greatest fear about term limits. You think politicians are corrupt NOW? They won’t even be slightly circumspect about it if re-election is no longer a worry.
Term limits are advocated by people who want to put limits on other voters, and are willing to limit themselves in order to do so.
If you want to “vote the bums out”, than vote that way, but don’t try to limit other people, particularly people in other districts, who may like their current representative.
This is exactly it. As I said before, the Constitution had term limits when it was written. Republicans amended the Constitution to take away people’s rights to re-elect Democrats to the presidency. Now they want to take away your right to elect Democrats to other positions. If Americans weren’t such a lazy ignorant lot, they would realize how lucky they are to have their legislatures and executive under term limits already. And they might wise up and realize that the modern ‘pro-limit’ effort doesn’t address the problem originally in the Constitution, no term limit for judges.