RE: Congressional Term Limits
January 2, 2021 at 10:13 am
(This post was last modified: January 2, 2021 at 10:48 am by Aristocatt.)
(January 2, 2021 at 4:31 am)Apollo Wrote: What is your reasoning in not supporting limits? What are the pros and cons in your mind?
So that’s pretty much the thing...all of the things I assumed were pros, like decreasing corruption, decreasing lobbying, etc, appear to be cons(term limits make the problem either no better or they make it worse) I’m not sure if there are any pros.
Take just a basic example of whether or not term limits might broadly reduce corruption by changing their incentives...
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default...071112.pdf
It doesn't seem to be the case that it makes the incentives any better, but it does appear to make them worse in the final year of an officials term.
We could drill down into the specifics of the kind of corruption we think we might be addressing too, and the data isn't very promising.
The wall that I am kind of hitting here, is I thought term limits were an obviously good thing until I started looking into it more. Now I have a bit of cognitive dissonance, with part of me being amazed at how ineffectual term limits are, and the other part thinking "I must just be missing something here". So I am trying to be as open ended with the question as I can to see how other people might frame their arguments.
(January 2, 2021 at 6:00 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The only way to do this would be by constitutional amendment, a process entirely in the hands of elected politicians.
Good luck with that.
Boru
It isn't immediately clear to me that a state couldn't sue again and possibly overturn term limits v Thornton. That had a pretty strong partisan split Dems(majority) Reps(Minority), and no one from the majority is in SCOTUS any more.
That would probably be the path of least resistance, to attempt to make it constitutional for individual states to mandate term limits for their Congressional officials.
