Term Limits

If you ask people whether they support term limits most will say that they do. They look at the politicians who have been in office for decades and think that the answer is obvious - throw the bums out! They look at Senators like Diane Feinstein who doesn't seem like she is "there" all then time and is in and out of hospitals with multiple physical afflictions; they see Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who twice has frozen in mid-sentence, seemingly having a stroke right in front of everyone. A number of members of Congress as well as the two likely presidential major party candidates are around 80 years old. Even when you ignore age, some politicians seem to get elected and never go away. President Joe Biden has a combined 40+ years of elected office, interrupted for only four years between his term as Vice-President and his election as President. 

Seems like an ironclad argument for term limits? 

I disagree. 

We already have a way to term limit an office holder: elections. 

We have legislative term limits in Nebraska. In my view it is not a net positive. With frequent turnover in the Unicameral, we have no institutional memory, we have no real understanding of how things work. Being in a job where I have to implement decisions that the legislature makes, I regularly see how the legislators don't know how to write laws and how it's the lobbyists and special interests who have the real power. 

So, if there are regular elections (members of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years) why do the same people keep getting elected while at the same time we decry the fact that the same people keep getting elected? The short answer is that people are stupid. Even the voters who aren't stupid are often lazy. I understand the tendency in the general election to stick with "your team". There is enough difference between Republicans and Democrats at the national level and increasingly at the state and local level, that most people will vote for their team no matter who is running. But what about primaries? Yes, the parties tend to support the incumbent, even if not overtly, in the primaries, but how often do voters do any research into the various candidates, other than draw conclusions from their campaign ads? It's extremely rare for an incumbent to get "primaried"; it happens so infrequently that it's big news when it happens. In an era when it's possible to get relevant information about a candidate on a granular level, there's no excuse to be ignorant of the relevant strengths of primary candidates. But unless there is some scandal that can't be explained away, the incumbent gets the nomination and more often than not they're running in a "safe" district and are guaranteed reelection. 

Stop being stupid. Stop being lazy. Term limit the bums by voting them out!