Term limits

What will term limits bring?

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...

Where did the Founding Fathers go wrong?

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...

The danger of unlimited terms

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...

What do men entrenched in power do?

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,...

Special interests

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,...

Power corrupts

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...