Should There Be A Constitutional Amendment On Term Limits For Congress For 12 Years?

[MarkD]

I agree with what some other posters above have said -- that there is no evidence that term-limited legislators are any better than legislators who are not term-limited, that term limits on Congressmen might make the lobbyists more important and powerful, that experience is not something that should be thrown away.

Voters already have the ability to throw out an incumbent who might be in office for "too long" (whatever that might mean). We have already seen members of Congress get rejected for re-election even though they had been in office for 20 years, 30 years, and more. Think of former members of the House like Joe Crowley, Mike Capuano, Dana Rohrabacher, Pete Sessions, Corrine Brown, John Mica, Ralph Hall, Nick Rahall, Tim Holden, Cliff Stearns, Paul Kanjorski, Soloman Ortiz, Rick Boucher, James Oberstar, Ike Skelton, and current Representatives Eliot Engel and Lacy Clay. Those are just members of the House who have lost in the last 10 years even though they had 20 years or more of service in the House. Then there are Senators who have lost even though they were in office already for 24 years or more: Arlen Spectre, Richard Lugar, Ted Stevens, and William Roth. These lists include members of Congress who lost primary elections as well as general elections.