Liberty Amendments I - Congressional Term Limits

This amendment gets a GO from me!

SECTION 1: No person may serve more than twelve years as a member of Congress, whether such service is exclusively in the House or the Senate or combined in both Houses.

SECTION 2: Upon ratification of this Article, any incumbent member of Congress whose term exceeds the twelve-year limit shall complete the current term, but thereafter shall be ineligible for further service as a member of Congress.

Levin, Mark R. (2013-08-13). The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic (p. 19). Threshold Editions. Kindle Edition. 

For almost as long as I remember discussions of them, I have been against congressional term limits.  I have always believed that no one has the right to tell another that they cannot elect the representative that they want to elect.  My views on this changed as I gained a better understanding of what it means to be a Constitutional Republic.

Of course, I assume that most readers of this work will know that we are not a democracy but are, instead, a constitutional republic.  The difference is that, in a democracy, the majority wins and the minority loses every time.  In a constitutional republic, government is by representatives and bound by a constitution such that, in the case of our own original Constitution, the people are represented by the House of Representatives and the states are represented by the Senate.  In a constitutional republic, the minority is protected by the Constitution and, at least hopefully, by the greater wisdom of the representatives in government.

Given that we are a constitutional republic, and given that the large majority of people, against all conceivable logic, continue to reelect the same representatives over and over again, then it is the duty of the republic to protect the minority from the ignorance (at best) or ill will (at worst) of the majority.  When the blind masses continue to elect professional politicians who only moved into a district in order to get into Congress, or who have been shown to be criminals, or who clearly do not represent the districts that elected them, then it is necessary to rethink how Congress is elected in order to protect the original intent of the Founders.

Had the Founders been able to even conceive of radio or television, of 30 and 40 year congressmen, of quarter-billion dollar congressional races, they would certainly, I believe, have included term limits.  Mr. Levin quotes many sources to demonstrate how narrowly term limits missed being in the Constitution.  Knowing what we know today would have been the straw that pushed the idea through.

Even if one were to argue that we have no way of knowing what the Founders would have done had they known of the technologies used to fool fools into voting for politicians, we still have original intent that was built into the Constitution in Article V.  The Founders understood that they could not say for certain that their plan was perfect at that time or that it would remain perfect over time.  They included the means by which we could modify the Constitution based on newer knowledge or understanding.  The power of the incumbency, using technology and massive government taxation, to fool the fools just was not understood - the Founders understood the concept but could never have imagined just how far the influence would go in 225 years - and it is knowledge that we now know we need to include in the Constitution in order to retain the original intent of the Union.

In the book, Mr. Levin discusses the historical debate over term limits including communication between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Jefferson and John Adams as well as state constitutions that, from the the beginning of the Union, included term limits for state office.  The concept of term limits is certainly not new.

I agree with Mark Levin whole-heartedly on the need for term limits just exactly as he has listed them in his proposed amendment.