The Reality of Term Limits

By Rich Loudenback

Shouting as loudly as possible “Get rid of them all with Term Limits” does feel righteous considering America’s downward plight while we witness career opportunistic politicians’ violations of their public’s trust and the sacred oaths they took to our Constitution.

REALITY:

• Throw them all out, sounds right. But Term Limits is DEAD WRONG!
• Term limits is literally ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’
• During last terms the incentive to do their best for re-election is gone.
• That ‘lame-duck’ status has created a mind-set to take advantage of opportunities to enrich themselves on the way out.  What do they have to lose?  Nobody is watching anyway.  Which is the real BIG problem today.
• States with Term Limits have experienced NO decline in the number of career politicians. They move to other positions in government or with NGO’s (Non Government Organizations).

Frankly, if we, the electorate, are foolishly not paying attention to corrupt or inept elected officials, why would anyone think we will not repeat that same lack of attention foolishly with the next crop of candidates which might be of the same or worse ilk should a term limit law require replacement?

Conversely, great elected officials should be relished and praised as long as possible. Those few very good ones are what we should have everywhere should we be responsibly doing our jobs as bosses in our government ‘OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE.’ So therein lies the problem. It’s not the bad politicians that are the problem. We are the problem, for not doing our part in paying attention. We are too trusting and we are not culling them and replacing them with accountable patriots at the polls. Think Donald Trump’s: YOU’RE FIRED!

America is not supposed to be a ‘Magic Kingdom’ providing material and monetary benefits for its citizens and certainly not for non-citizens (illegal aliens). America is, most simply put: ….about Freedom. REAL FREEDOM is about the Freedom to win and the Freedom to benefit from learning when not attaining our goals and then moving on strengthened from the experience.

The consequences of our run-away big government’s guarantees, freebie phones, entitlements, subsidies, welfare fraud, grant abuses, government lies, redundancies, waste, manipulated loan interests, covert propaganda, travel and expense abuses, fraudulent loans, fixed bids, bribery & kickbacks, ‘stimulating’ beer & cigarette sales, overreach, utter theft, and the damaging deceitful free trade programs that have been foisted upon us actually damage our freedoms by penalizing our costs, unbalancing our commerce and markets while de-incentivizing our citizens.

THE WISDOM OF OUR FOUNDERS ON ‘TERM LIMITS’

• Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 72 expressed his sense of the question of term limits: “Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection.”

• During the debates on the subject at the original constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman expressed a similar opinion: “Frequent elections are necessary to preserve the good behavior of rulers. They also tend to give permanency to the Government, by preserving that good behavior, because it ensures their re-election.”

• In Federalist, No. 53, James Madison wrote: “No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgement a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate. A part of this knowledge may be acquired by means of information which lie within the compass of men in private as well as public stations. Another part can only be attained, or at least thoroughly attained, by actual experience in the station which requires the use of it…. A few of the members [of Congress], as happens in all such assemblies, will possess superior talents; will, by frequent re-elections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt will they be to fall into the snares that may be laid for them.”

• At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Governor Morris spoke on the subject, too. Madison records Morris saying: “The ineligibility proposed by the [term limits] clause as it stood tended to destroy the great motive to good behavior, the hope of being rewarded by a re-appointment. It was saying to him, ‘make hay while the sun shines.’”

• John Adams wrote in his ‘Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America’: There is no right clearer, and few of more importance, than that the people should be at liberty to choose the ablest and best men, and that men of the greatest merit should exercise the most important employments; yet, upon the present [term limits] supposition, the people voluntarily resign this right, and shackle their own choice…. They must all return to private life, and be succeeded by another set, who have less wisdom, wealth, virtue, and less of the confidence and affection of the people.”

• Samuel Adams summed it up perfectly in 1790: “Much safer is it, and much more does it tend to promote the welfare and happiness of society to fill up the offices of Government after the mode prescribed in the American Constitution, by frequent elections of the people. They may indeed be deceived in their choice; they sometimes are; but the evil is not incurable; the remedy is always near; they will feel their mistakes, and correct them.

“Let’s use frequent elections to restrain any legislator who abuses his access to power, not rely on nanny state “term limits” to restrain our liberty. And let us take the shackles off of states and encourage them to exercise their power to refuse to enforce any act of the federal government that exceeds the power given to it in the Constitution.”

GOVERNMENT GROWTH ERODES FREEDOMS

We are experiencing the utter death of common sense in America, and we must recognize the overwhelming onslaught to our way of life by government itself because most Americans’ apathetically are not paying attention to how their elected representatives are voting with our Constitution in order to keep America free and competitive.

As government grows our freedoms are diminished because of the constant and enormous strangulating costs, taxes and regulations. Freedom’s cancer is big  government! (Click this link, A Must See!) There is just too much ‘socialism’ in government, ‘trying to do for everybody.’  Socialism is being taught in our schools and universities, you know. And our elected officials, asleep at the ‘reality switch,’ are helping it grow with every do good,’ ‘bring home the bacon’ abuse they concoct or support at the bidding of their orchestrated party leadership. This socializing of America is not a party thing. Both parties are guilty.  All that counts is what they do and how they vote!

Bob Adelmann wrote in an article in ‘The New American’ magazine in 2011, “The more dependent the citizens become on their government, the less influence they are likely to have in any substantial downsizing of that government.”

Elected officials usually schmooze us so well because we have not studied their actual voting records.  Remember, it matters not what they say, it only matters what they do and how they vote according to the Freedom Indexes.

WHAT WE MUST DO

Firstly, recognize you should take with a grain of salt what you get from the big media. They are blatantly in the tank with the power elite socialists’ agenda who would have us evolve into a member state of a global government run by these very people who are unaccountable and unelected who know best for everyone about everything. Vet your news and seek authentic sources or contact competent conservative organizations such as The CATO Institute at cato.org, The John Birch Society at jbs.org or The New American.com website. If you wish to wake up someone else with a most effective 29 minute video click here for ‘Overview of America.’

American patriots must study issues, inform others, follow the Freedom Indexes for the U.S. Congress at TheFreedomIndex@JBS.org and for the state of Idaho at IdahoFreedomIndex.com and fire elected officials who are not following our rule of law through the Constitution. There is no other way to right our absolute mess. Presidents, congressmen, senators and governors created this boondoggle we’ve become and they must pay for it by being replaced at the ballot box, ending their political careers and being replaced with real accountable patriots who understand the Constitution and take their oaths to it seriously. They need to know we are watching!

PERTINENT ‘PEARLS’ FROM THOMAS SOWELL

“Liberals have never understood the significance of that great line from On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando says: ‘I coulda been a contender!’ Nothing you can give anybody is a substitute for letting him achieve on his own.”

“Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.”

“Bad as it is financially for the federal government to be saddled with the runaway costs of ‘entitlement’ programs, it is far worse for the society as a whole to be saddled with millions of people with the ‘entitlement’ mentality and all the social problems that go with it.”

“Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a visitor from one of the colonies said to a London audience: ‘Please, do not do any more good in my country. We have suffered too much from the good that you have done already.’ That is my reaction to most of the liberal social programs for minorities and the poor today.”

“If the government punishes people for being productive by hitting them with big tax increases, and rewards people for being unproductive by giving them entitlements from the taxpayers’ money, how is that likely to lead to a more productive economy?”

“When the history of corporate America is written, one of its most shameful chapters will be about how big business sold out to political correctness, by inflicting the harangues of ‘diversity consultants’ on their employees and donating their stockholders’ money to advocacy groups opposed to the free market on which their own existence depends.”

“There is so much money, and so much publicity, available for saying far-out things that we are lucky to hear any common sense at all.”

“One of the most dangerous trends of our times is that increasing numbers of people have a vested interest in the helplessness of other people.”