The One-Term Limit

I believe that career politicians are bad because they spend most of their time and a lot of money from contributors working to get reelected again and again instead of working for the benefit of their constituents. Presidential term limits have served us well, but they're not enough. If limited to a ONE term, no U.S. Senator or Representative (or President or judge) will ever spend a minute campaigning while in office.

Our founding fathers assumed that every elected official would spend a few years in office and then return to his “real" job, so term limits were left out of the Constitution. Now, virtually everyone elected to public office tries to hold that office as long as possible. If he doesn’'t have such intentions at first, the Washington mindset soon poisons him, and today we have a Congress with a 17% favorable rating.

You may believe that members of Congress become more valuable as they gain experience. If so, you might oppose term limits, period. I contend that experience leads to a greater probability that the office holder will become less proficient, and as Lord Acton rightly observed, corrupted by power.” In spite of incompetence due to age or corruption, incumbents gain unfair advantage over their challengers partly by delivering “pork.”

The Constitution grants control over elections to the states. This means that One-Term Limit laws could be passed by the individual states without a Constitutional amendment. If this occurred, we could by comparison discover the best process, both for other states and eventually, for the republic.

In summary, the advantages of the one-term limit are these:
1. Force elected officials not to spend so much time and energy on getting reelected, and therefore contribute more to benefiting their constituents.
2. Eliminate vote-buying attempts to get reelected, including “bringing home the pork."
3. Eliminate the significant advantage to the incumbent over his rival in all elections.
4. Drastically reduce voting fraud and other election corruption, which normally occur when an incumbent has established support from politically-oriented institutions.
5. Make better laws by exploiting the advantage of real-world experience.
6. Save incredible amounts of money by eliminating campaign expenses.
7. Give more weight to a candidate's ideas and proposals than to his party affiliation.