There has been a lot of discussion among political junkies lately about Term Limits and about an Article V Convention to institute Term Limits. First I would like to deal with the issue of Term Limits.
A friend who opposes Term Limits sent me the following:
Opposition to Term Limits
- Term Limits destroy our voting freedom and force us to toss out the good with the bad.
2. We have term limits now; they’re called “elections.”America’s best term-limiting device is the ballot box.
3. Term limits would mean giving lobbyists & bureaucrats more power, in that institutional memory and experience are no longer available.
4. In his farewell address in 1989, President Reagan rightly pointed out that term limits are “a preemption of the people’s right to vote for whomever they want as many times as they want.”
5. Right now, after a candidate is defeated, we have a lame duck period where there is no longer accountability to the voters for two months. A Term Limits Amendment for Congress would extend the lame duck period from two months to two years in the case of U.S. Representatives and to six years in the case of U.S. Senators!
6. The real problem is that the politicians we elect ignore our Constitution –yet we keep reelecting them.
7. Limiting their terms by an amendment merely increases the turnover of politicians in Congress who ignore our Constitution –and to whom we must pay luxurious lifetime pensions.
8. The Articles of Confederation, our first Constitution, set term limits on the Continental Congress. Our Framers considered this and rejected the idea of congressional term limits. James Madison wrote in Federalist 53: “…The greater the proportion of new members of Congress, and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt they be to fall into the snares that may be laid before them.”
9. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater: yes, term limits would help eliminate some of the corrupt, power-hungry, incompetent Congress members, but it would also get rid of all the honest and effective ones.
Those are all good points.
Briefly I want to comment on the idea of an Article V Convention. Below are some of the issues I have with an Article V Convention:
Despite the false assurance of supporters, such a convention cannot be limited to one amendment or to specific subject matter.
In our nation today, there is widespread ignorance of the principles and original intent of the U.S. Constitution as set forth by its founders.
If the current Constitution is not obeyed, why would anyone obey a changed one?
I simply do not believe that our current political leaders have the intellectual capacity or the basic unifying principles that our Founding Fathers had. I simply do not trust our current political leaders with my freedom.