It’s been a while! Mothering and pregnancy has kept me pretty busy of late. But today in my study of the constitution I was reading about something that I wanted to write about- why the founders chose to give no term limits to Congress. This is an interesting topic to me because I have watched the way career politicians abuse their power-in both parties. I tend to agree with those who call for term limits. Get the career politicians out of there and put in people who are closer to real life and the citizenry of America and who are there with the right motives. They will more likely do what is best for the people and the states than those who have been in so long they have lost touch with the real needs of Americans and are just there to gain power. I have felt this way even about the Senate which was purposefully formed to give a longevity of wisdom and experience to Congress to balance out the House.
In The 5000 Year Leap, Cleon Skousen quotes from and summarizes what the founders intended from those in public office:
“They (the founders) strongly believed that the best citizens should accept major roles in public life. They believed people with talent and demonstrated qualities of leadership should have the same sense of duty as that which Washington exhibited when he allowed himself to be called out of retirement three separate times to serve the country.”
In the early years of our country it was considered an honor granted to men by their community to serve rather than a way to achieve power and status and money. The founders believed that citizens should feel it a duty to serve out of public virtue, not to satisfy greed and ambition. Said Benjamin Franklin to a friend in England, “In America, salaries, where indispensable are extremely low; but much of public business is done gratis. The honor of serving the public ably and faithfully is deemed sufficient. Public spirit really exists there, and has great affects.”
The founders expected farmers, teachers, lawyers, indeed all types of men to run for office, serve for a time and then return to society. However, they understood human nature and did their best to guard against it’s evils in government. In warning to the Continental Congress, Franklin later told of the negative results of human nature on elected officials he’d seen in England,
“There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects. Place before the eyes of such men a post of honor, that shall at the same time be a place of profit, and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it. The vast number of such places it is that renders the British government so tempestuous.”
John Adams also expressed his hope that America would rise above Britain’s tendencies when he said,
“Politics are the divine science, after all. How is it possible that any man should ever think of making it subservient to his own little passions and mean private interests? Ye baseborn sons of fallen Adam, is the end of politics a fortune, a family, a gilded coach, a train of horses, and a troop of livery servants, balls at Court, splendid dinners and suppers? Yet the divine science of politics is at length in Europe reduced to a mechanical system composed of these materials.”
Could a more modern version of this quote from John Adams be applicable today? I quote from these founders not to say that those in Congress today are there only to make money. I realize it is still not a high paying job. Nor am I saying that they all started out with evil intentions. However the power and prestige that comes with office can an often does go to ones head after a while. It must or we would not be seeing back room deals and legislation like we are seeing. There is something in the way human nature works, that man grows accustomed to the power and will do all kinds of things to keep a hold of it. One of my favorite quotes from a movie about a president is, “I was so busy trying to keep my job that I forgot to do my job.” I think we see too much of that.
The founders knew this would happen and did everything they could to prepare for and prevent it, yet they did not put term limits on Congress. WHY? Today in my reading of The Making of America, also by Skousen, I learned that they chose not to because they 1. felt it interfered with the rights of the people who would elect them 2. would change the dynamic of the office and 3. cause the legislators to lose interest in their important work.
From Robert Livingston, “The people are the best judges who ought to represent them. To dictate and control them, to tell them whom they shall not elect, is to abridge their natural rights. This requirement of constant rotation is an absurd species of ostracism-a mode of proscribing eminent merit, and banishing from stations of trust those who have filled them with the greatest faithfulness.”
From William Henry Harrison, “If the senator is conscious that his re-election depends only on the will of the people, and is not fettered by any law, he will feel an ambition to deserve well of the public. On the contrary, if he knows that no meritorious exertions of his own can procure a reappointment, he will become more unambitious, and regardless of public opinion. The love of power, in a republican government, is ever attended by a proportionable sense of dependence.
And from Alexander Hamilton: “When a man knows he must quit his station, let his merit be what it may, he will turn his attention chiefly to his own emolument.”
These ideas struck me as common sense and I was surprised to find myself questioning my previous thoughts on term limits. Should we put term limits on our Congress? Were there to be limits, we would certainly see what these founders described. It is human nature. And so then we are brought back to the original question put before the founders themselves. How do we empower a government enough and not too much? How do we curb and control the natural inclination to seek power? There may have been many a “Mr. Smith” going to Washington in our current Congress or in any of recent history, but they don’t all stay as true to their civic virtue as Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra’s film. And, if they had gone back and done a movie after Mr. Smith had been in Congress for 15 years, what would the movie have been like then? What would he have been like after years of wheeling and dealing and working with unions and Wall street and re-election? It is a tough question. As James Madison so aptly put it, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
Would term limits help or hinder? The founders did the best they could to prevent problems, but believed that a well educated and actively involved electorate would be the final check on government. Is corruption there because we as regular citizens are not paying enough attention? Are we are not closely enough involved to kick out the ones who go astray and misuse their power? In a nation as big as ours is it possible to stay that closely involved anymore? I believe we have grown complacent, but is that all there is to the problem? Would the negative effects of term limits be better than the lack has been? I don’t know the answers, but it is something to think for those proponents of term limits.
