Term limits
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
Term limit (noun)
– A provision, as in a state constitution or city charter, that restricts the number of terms an elected or appointed official may serve.
– A legal restriction that limits the number of terms a person may serve in a particular elected office.
– The maximum number of terms one may legally serve in a particular elected office.
The writers of the U.S. Constitution addressed the length of the term of office for the president, vice president, senators, and representatives, but they did not place a limit upon the number of terms that one could possibly serve.
Our first president, George Washington, would set the precedent of a president serving no more than two terms when he stepped away from public office at the end of his second term in 1797. This was followed as a tradition until Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for unprecedented third and fourth terms as president in 1940 and 1944.
This in turn led the U.S. Congress to pass the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1947 that limited all future presidents to just two terms.
While it was a noble gesture to prevent anyone from one day effectively becoming a “president for life,” our Congress did nothing to limit their own terms of office or their ability to hold high public office for the remainder of their own lives.
Credit must be given to those senators and representatives who introduce a Term Limit Bill each time Congress begins a new session, but the remainder of all of Congress, both in the House and in the Senate, must be held accountable for their failure to limit their own power.
While Alabama has no control of the politicians from other states, it is doubtful that the Founding Fathers who created the United States government imagined someone like Democratic Representative John Dingle of Michigan, who served an uninterrupted tenure of more than 59 years from 1955 to 2015, or our current Democratic President Joesph Biden, who has been in public office for 49 years.
Thankfully the longest serving member of our current Congress is Republican Donald Young of Alaska, who has only served 48 years over 25 terms as their representative since 1973. Following on his heels is Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who has served more than 46 years, and further down the list is Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky with more than 36 years and Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California who is in her eighteenth term since 1987 for more than 34 years in office.
We can be thankful that Alabama Senator Richard Shelby is finally stepping down after 42-plus years in office. Out of all of these, and hundreds more who have served in the U.S. Congress, none of them ever once voted to limit their own power by limiting the number of terms they could possibly serve.
As Alexander Hamilton so eloquently stated in the Federalist No. 21, in 1787, “The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.”
Until we the people can elect persons who will actually put the needs of their constituents above their own visions of grandeur, it is up to the American voter to remove every politician from any office by voting them out of their position.
I challenge you, the voter, to look at how long any candidate has already been in office, and if it has been more than a decade, it is time for them to return to the life of the everyday citizen, and it is time for another everyday citizen to step up to actually represent those who put them into their high public office.