Term limits

Term limits are one of the most difficult political innovations to implement. The problem lies in the inherent conflict of interest of politicians. In the United States Congress, for example, two-thirds of both houses need to vote for a constitutional amendment to be...

A professional politician focuses on delivering the goods for his campaign contributors. At first he may do this with distaste, but as the years go by and his corruption advances, he does it with gusto and grim relentlessness. On budget issues, he considers neither...

Breaks between terms have proved ineffective. Likewise, allowing representatives to become senators and senators to become representatives, and so forth, is mere window-dressing. These arrangements invariably ensure that the same old faces turn up, time and time...

A rotation therefore, in power and magistracy, is essentially necessary to a free government. It is indeed the thing itself; and constitutes, animates, and informs it, as much as the soul constitutes the man. It is a thing sacred and inviolable, wherever liberty is...

The Founding Fathers understood the importance of term limits, yet they failed to include them in the Constitution. In an effort to remedy this oversight in relation to the presidency, George Washington declined to serve more than two terms. He thus established a...

It is wisdom in a state, and a sign that they judge well, to suppose, that all men who can enslave them, will enslave them. Generosity, self-denial, and private and personal virtues, are in politics but mere names, or rather cant-words. —Thomas Gordon. Cato’s Letters...

Few men have been desperate enough to attack openly, and barefaced, the liberties of a free people. Such avowed conspirators can rarely succeed. The attempt would destroy itself. Even when the enterprise is begun and visible, the end must be hid, or denied. It is the...

They will squander away the public money in wanton presents to minions, and their creatures of pleasure or of burden, or in pensions to mercenary and worthless men and women, for vile ends and traitorous purposes. They will engage their country in ridiculous,...

The desire to be re-elected is the root cause of most corruption in politics. The absence of term limits gives office holders an incentive to accept bribes from special interests as a means of retaining office. These bribes take the form of direct campaign donations,...

Men, when they first enter into magistracy, have often their former condition before their eyes: They remember what they themselves suffered, with their fellow-subjects, from the abuse of power, and how much they blamed it; and so their first purposes are to be...