RSS
Home
Jim DeMint proposes term limits for Congress
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), official photo from Senate website.
Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) today announced his latest legislative introduction: a Congressional Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution to limit the maximum terms of service of Senators and Representatives.
Senator DeMint has three other Senators co-sponsoring his proposed amendment: Tom Coburn (R-OK), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Sam Brownback (R-KS).
Senator DeMint is making this proposal in order to remove from Washington the class of "permanent politicians" that represent their constituents only in name, and have every incentive to self-identify as permanent residents of Washington, DC, and not as permanent residents of their respective States or districts. He has a point. A Representative might possibly be forced out of office because his State lost a district in the Census, and he winds up being the one told to sacrifice his seat. That, of course, cannot happen to a Senator. Either type of member of Congress might be removed from office for misconduct. Rarely, he gets voted out--and Senator DeMint points out that 90% of all incumbents who seek re-election, win re-election.
Tom Coburn offers greater detail on why incumbents win re-election 90% of the time:
The power of incumbency has created an almost insurmountable advantage for Washington politicians. Incumbency allows politicians to raise millions of dollars in campaign funds in exchange for earmarks. Incumbency gives Congress the power to raise money for itself – Congress just approved itself an increase of nearly $250 million from the U.S. Treasury that members will spend to promote themselves.
Senator Coburn also points out that with redistricting (except for the unlucky Representative who gets drawn out of the House if his State loses one or more seats), a Representative, having good connections with his State legislature, can "choose his voters."
The effect of this amendment would be very simple. Senators would be limited to two terms or fifteen years, and Representatives would be limited to three terms or seven years. The President of the United States is, of course, limited to two terms or ten years. And just as Presidential term limits did not constrain the then-sitting President (Harry S. Truman, who declined to run anyway), this new proposed amendment would start to count every Senate or House election after it takes effect.
Congress proposed the eventually-ratified Amendment 22, limiting the service of Presidents, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt shocked everybody (in both parties) by running for a third term, and then a fourth. (He thus became the seventh President to leave the White House feet first.) The prevailing opinion at the time was that a President who could succeed himself again and again would not be too different from a king--or perhaps a Dictator Perpetuus, the office that Julius Caesar held before he was assassinated. But what everybody forgot was that the Senate of Rome was once called "an assemblage of kings," as the late Will Durant reminded everyone in his book, The Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ. If Congress has now become an assemblage of kings (the Senate) and an assemblage of dukes (the House), then it's past time that their terms of service were limited.
Add to it that if Senators and congressmen knew that they would have to live under the very laws that they made, they'd be more inclined to repeal laws than to pass new ones.
