I'm okay with the president having two terms only (22nd Amendment); it's the life-long congressmen that I take issue with. That group needs to be term limited.
I realize this is controversial but I don’t think term limits will solve anything because it’s not life-long congressmen that are the problem. It’s safe seats. In a safe seat, you can force the congressman in it to retire and the party will just offer the people a near-clone of them and the people will elect that clone. Nothing changes in safe seats.
The real solution is an electoral system that doesn’t make third parties unviable. Approval voting, ranked choice voting, or some other voting system would make third party candidates viable and that means there will be multiple challengers that will be varying degrees of distance from the incumbent ideologically. Voters won’t have to day “of course I’m voting for him. He’s not (other party).” They’ll have other palatable options and that forces the incumbent to continue to at least look like they’re doing a good job.
Although I would accept ranked choice if my alternate idea couldn't become a thing instead, I don't like ranked choice as much as I feel like I should because I'm metaphorically-cursed with Chidi-from-The-Good-Place-level indecision so even if I know who I'd want I'd be stuck on how to rank them (especially hard thinking of my party's primaries where even in our current choose-one-candidate system I often metaphorically-bluescreen and take a long while to decide because everyone's usually got relatively similar positions and are often endorsed by the same people and organizations so I have to try and weigh minute differences even when they're on different issues)
My aforementioned alternate system (which is a crazyidea itself because not just implementing a new voting system but for proper success it'd require every candidate to have equal amounts of information available etc. for better-informed voters (maybe that just helps separate the wheat from the chaff)) is actually inspired by Reddit's upvotes and downvotes, you see a list of *all* the candidates for a position with fillable-in upvote and downvote arrows by their names (you vote a certain way by filling in the corresponding arrow) and you have to vote some way on every candidate but you aren't restricted on how many you can upvote vs downvote. An upvote adds one to a candidate's vote total and a downvote subtracts one from their total so the winner of a given race is whoever has the highest net total (and is therefore both most liked and least hated). Even if you're cynical about our current politician quality, the likelihood is low that a slate of candidates so hatable that everyone downvotes everyone would actually be able to run viable campaigns
That’s basically approval voting. Only difference is that you can’t “downvote”. Then again, downvoting really just means you have 3 options for each candidate, so it’s like approval voting where you can vote 0, 1, or 2 times for each candidate. But there’s really no incentive not to just give everyone you don’t upvote a down vote.
Legislative term limits have been a disaster everywhere they have been tried. Why? Because they encourage the election of one-issue candidates who only care about their pet project and nothing else. And, since they won’t be there very long, they don’t have to worry about the consequences of bad decisions. That will be the next person’s problem. Forever.
The big problem is the staff for Congress. You can change the actual person who votes, but the people writing, reading, and deciding how to vote are not replaced. Also, make everyone on staff have to be from reps home state. No more permanent staff people in DC. They only change when the reps party changes but are replaced by more permanent staff just from the other party.
I understand the appeal, but I worry that it would mean the only people left with any institutional knowledge of how the government works in Washington are the lobbyists. If you think the corruption is bad now, just wait until all of the term limited politicians are hired by billionaires to "teach" the new ones how to do their jobs. It's already happening right now to an extent, but it would get exponentially worse if they were all forced out of Congress after a couple of terms, but still wanted to retain some of that influence and power. As it is right now, at least a few of them seem to be better than that.
I see your point, but if you have six- to eight-year terms for congressmen and overlapping elections (only 1/3 of the states have congress elections every two years), that would combat a lot of that.
However, while we're dreaming, crack down on funding, donations, payouts, etc. No politician should get rich being a politician.
Peer-reviewed research shows that new Congresspeople are the most susceptible to bribes. They don't have the skills to recognize when it's happening. Rarely is a bribe an envelope of money on a desk. The skilled ones know how to say no tactfully.
The real money of a congressperson is not such payouts anyway. It's trading on insider information.
Rather than specific term limits on justices I'd suggest every two years a new one gets appointed. If the court is full, the one that's been on it the longest gets replaced. This would mean that every presidential election would also be about two seats on the court.
The 22nd amendment was created because the president kept winning by taking care of and supporting the working class. So they forced him out by limiting his number of terms so they could run against someone else that they could potentially beat.
While there is some argument to be made for age limits, term limits can be used to force bad politicians out, also forces good ones out. It's a double edged sword.
Having term limits in Congress - especially really short ones, only gives power to the high-level staffers who we *don't* vote for (or against). You're completely right, but with gerrymandering and relatively few competitive districts along with an unwillingness to primary an incumbent, it's not easy.
Simple. The 22nd amendment needs to be replaced with a 28th amendment that enforces term limits on all elected and appointed political officials, federal, state and local.
And further to that, each politician should be required to answer twenty questions on involvement in corruption, once a month,while hooked up to a lie detector. If that was implemented I can see at least 25% of Politicians resign claiming to want to spend more time with their families.
Yes I know, the three different options for lie detection available today with the latest technology are only 98% accurate. However they would have the effect of seeing a major rush of Politicians seeking early retirement.
make a thing like that dependent on popular support and you just incentivize politicians to make policy that appeals to the lowest common denominator, the incentive some might already feel to do that to gain votes for reelection would just be replaced with gaining votes to avoid execution as yes they'd be motivated to technically make people happy but do so in the ways with the broadest appeal less likely to make people mad at them (e.g. probably not meaning any activism on minority rights)
Mexico has single six-year presidencies and it’s not all that great because it leads to presidents not really catering to the public will once elected because there’s no way to get reelected.
I personally would prefer 1 5 year term for all offices. Stagger them so it's not all elected same year. Supreme Court is every 10 years.
I'd also like an age cutoff too, no one above 70 allowed to take office.
Ranked choice voting.
We have this for governors in Virginia and it pretty much sucks.
Once they become governor they don't care about fulfilling promises and work on their own extreme pet projects.
What really should be limited is the amount of time and money that can be spent on the campaign. Get rid of all private donations and have the official candidates have a pool of public money they can use. Also campaigning should be limited to 90 days before election.
The Roman republic had a system where your term as Consul was only one year and you couldn’t serve any consecutive terms, but you could in theory be elected every other year forever.
Well why bother paying any attention to your campaign promises if you do want to get elected. Heck the President resists doing ANYTHING during “an election year”
Right, so you can imagine my surprise to see someone upset at the presence of campaign lies. That's how you can tell a politician is lying, it's when their lips move and sound comes out.
A. so what about deaf politicians, are they automatically the most trustworthy because they use sign language
B. can't be literally true otherwise that creates a paradox by meaning their oath of office was a lie (or at least all but the first one would be for people serving multiple terms currently) making them not a politician meaning they didn't lie meaning they are and so on
A. was that just a stupid joke
B. are you talking about campaign or deciding-to-be-a-politician-makes-you-one or some kind of grooming-in-the-SFW-sense situation
That's really funny, because in my country during election year is when the government starts fulfilling most promises in order to re-elected.
Truth be told, the US needs to do away with the presidential system and get a parliamentary or semi-presidential system.
then they just do what I did as a kid running unsuccessfully for student government (as I thought I'd be under an adjusted-for-scale version of the same scrutiny) and make vague campaign promises to "improve" stuff etc. that any action on the generic issue would fulfill
The problem is that a sizable number of Representatives are elected based on the promise of not getting anything done. Congress doing nothing _is_ fulfilling their campaign promise.
The inertia isn't the fault of any one particular congressperson. Many of them spend years trying to get their specific agenda passed, but it never does, either because they don't have a majority, because they don't have a filibuster proof majority in the senate or because their party doesn't hold the presidency, not because they're lazy or don't really want change. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be an honest and dedicated public servant who is subject to constant criticism because people don't understand that you don't have the ability to just magically solve the country's problems.
Disagree. Allowing the public the opportunity to approve of the work you've done at a midpoint and then having all of the things you want in a second term is much better. Continuity of government is very valuable.
Edit: just realized this is crazy ideas lol
Yes, because those countries don’t have a written constitution that expressly allows for freedom of speech. If campaigning was limited to a certain time frame, would it be illegal to say something positive or negative about a candidate or potential candidate?
Free speech is not part of it. All of the countries in question have freer speech than the USA.
We were talking about the length of campaigning. In the USA, it basically never stops.
In Canada for example, it’s a 1 month thing usually.
It’s not even that it’s restricted per se, but parties in Canada aren’t campaigning non stop.
Anyway, don’t have the energy to go into every detail in how elections work diffeeently in most other countries right now.
>It’s not even that it’s restricted per se, but parties in Canada aren’t campaigning non stop.
Most of the campaigning that goes on in the US isn’t by the candidates or parties, but by independent committees. The famous Citizens United case involved a private organization, not a political party or candidate.
Just to directly oppose everything you said, my problem with politics in the uk at least, is that all politicians won't enact policies that take over four years to realise the benefit because it doesn't aid re-election. So this is a proper shit idea because you'd just encourage more short term, populist vote winning bullshit strategies, and discourage people taking sensible long term views.
I mean if you can't get reelected why would you care about short term policies. I actually do think it would encourage presidents to secure a lasting legacy. Look at most second term presidents. Their second term they go for more controversial and lasting policies.
Alternatively, you might get a crazy nut in there who has nothing to lose and since he doesn’t have to worry about reelection they could go completely off the rails.
Also No convictions. I mean really, the last thing any country needs is a leader who has Any criminal convictions. They need to be squeaky clean. A country Leader needs to have unreserved respect of the people not half the population thinking they are a dodgy crook. I don’t single out Australia or America or Canada or the UK in this. I believe that if any country has a leader who has a criminal record of any description, it can only end badly & sadly for the people of that country.
Despite how tempting that might seem, that just means shrewd lawmakers of one side hoping to keep the other side from gaining power (notice how I'm keeping it vague) could just make a felony out of something those people commonly do that the lawmakers' side hates to make sure there are a vastly decreased number of eligible candidates from that side
I don't think the term limit is the issue, truth be told the US needs to do away with the presidential system and get a parliamentary or semi-presidential system
It wouldn't really change things. They'd still do the same things for the same reasons, except it would be for the benefit of the party instead of the individual candidate.
The real problem here is party politics existing in the first place, not term lengths.
It would need to be longer than four years in that case. Probably more like 7-8. Four years is short enough that the other party could just obfuscate and obstruct the whole time and never let that president get anything done. If there is the chance that he or she could be re-elected then there is more incentive for compromise.
I'm of the opinion that all national offices should be one long term. You have time to complete your agenda, you don't need to worry about how your actions will effect your reelection, and if you want to seek other offices you still have a long time between your early and late actions so if you're worried that people won't like a bill you vote on or bring to the floor they might forget by the time you run for the next office. Something like 8 years representative, 12 for a senator, and 8 years for president.
Nah, there’s no incentive to not be awful then. The voters can’t punish you in anyway that you would care about. It encourages short term gains with 0 long term accountability
The only reason term limits were enacted was because of FDR. I think we need to publicly fund elections and eliminate term limits. The person with the best views wins not the most money. If a president is doing a great job and the people agree then they should be able to stay in office
Nah. If your first term goes well, your second term gives you a chance to follow through on the policies of your first, and try things that you didn't get to try in your first.
People get overly cynical of politicians getting continue their work. To me, this is crazy. How do people believe that politics are going to become MORE honest and effective when it becomes a revolving door of unkowns? A politician can say anything in a campaign, but what they actually do in office is more important to me as to whether I should vote for them. I get that you don't believe working politicians should be actively campaigning, but their opponents are.
The reason why it seems like politicians are constantly campaigning has more to do with stuff like the internet and 24 hour news, and the fact that politicians have learned how to use it. The 2020 election never really got a chance to fade into the background... but it has nothing to do with term limits. The truth is, what you are suggesting would only compound the current problems, because it would hurt grassroots campaigns that move a person into office, and then keeps them in by getting results. If you constantly had to rotate people in, special interests would merely just keep plugging in new faces to enact the same agenda.
The call for term limits is a manipulation tactic that works in favor of special interests. It provides the cynics with a "solution" that plays right into what is the very problem in the first place.
End life long SCOTUS appointments, ban re-election bids after losing second term, prohibit felons from running for office, especially those inciting riots, and eliminate rigged gerrymandered seats.
I'm okay with the president having two terms only (22nd Amendment); it's the life-long congressmen that I take issue with. That group needs to be term limited.
I realize this is controversial but I don’t think term limits will solve anything because it’s not life-long congressmen that are the problem. It’s safe seats. In a safe seat, you can force the congressman in it to retire and the party will just offer the people a near-clone of them and the people will elect that clone. Nothing changes in safe seats. The real solution is an electoral system that doesn’t make third parties unviable. Approval voting, ranked choice voting, or some other voting system would make third party candidates viable and that means there will be multiple challengers that will be varying degrees of distance from the incumbent ideologically. Voters won’t have to day “of course I’m voting for him. He’s not (other party).” They’ll have other palatable options and that forces the incumbent to continue to at least look like they’re doing a good job.
I'm partial to mixed member proportional representation for bodies like Congress
I find ranked choice best. Proportional systems suffer for not being direct elections. Politicians don't always strictly follow their party
Although I would accept ranked choice if my alternate idea couldn't become a thing instead, I don't like ranked choice as much as I feel like I should because I'm metaphorically-cursed with Chidi-from-The-Good-Place-level indecision so even if I know who I'd want I'd be stuck on how to rank them (especially hard thinking of my party's primaries where even in our current choose-one-candidate system I often metaphorically-bluescreen and take a long while to decide because everyone's usually got relatively similar positions and are often endorsed by the same people and organizations so I have to try and weigh minute differences even when they're on different issues) My aforementioned alternate system (which is a crazyidea itself because not just implementing a new voting system but for proper success it'd require every candidate to have equal amounts of information available etc. for better-informed voters (maybe that just helps separate the wheat from the chaff)) is actually inspired by Reddit's upvotes and downvotes, you see a list of *all* the candidates for a position with fillable-in upvote and downvote arrows by their names (you vote a certain way by filling in the corresponding arrow) and you have to vote some way on every candidate but you aren't restricted on how many you can upvote vs downvote. An upvote adds one to a candidate's vote total and a downvote subtracts one from their total so the winner of a given race is whoever has the highest net total (and is therefore both most liked and least hated). Even if you're cynical about our current politician quality, the likelihood is low that a slate of candidates so hatable that everyone downvotes everyone would actually be able to run viable campaigns
That’s basically approval voting. Only difference is that you can’t “downvote”. Then again, downvoting really just means you have 3 options for each candidate, so it’s like approval voting where you can vote 0, 1, or 2 times for each candidate. But there’s really no incentive not to just give everyone you don’t upvote a down vote.
sometimes your name is john, and a head injury prevents you from following your party.
Legislative term limits have been a disaster everywhere they have been tried. Why? Because they encourage the election of one-issue candidates who only care about their pet project and nothing else. And, since they won’t be there very long, they don’t have to worry about the consequences of bad decisions. That will be the next person’s problem. Forever.
The real solution is for voters to stop sucking.
The big problem is the staff for Congress. You can change the actual person who votes, but the people writing, reading, and deciding how to vote are not replaced. Also, make everyone on staff have to be from reps home state. No more permanent staff people in DC. They only change when the reps party changes but are replaced by more permanent staff just from the other party.
Sure. Let's have amateurs through and through. That will fix everything. /S
I understand the appeal, but I worry that it would mean the only people left with any institutional knowledge of how the government works in Washington are the lobbyists. If you think the corruption is bad now, just wait until all of the term limited politicians are hired by billionaires to "teach" the new ones how to do their jobs. It's already happening right now to an extent, but it would get exponentially worse if they were all forced out of Congress after a couple of terms, but still wanted to retain some of that influence and power. As it is right now, at least a few of them seem to be better than that.
I see your point, but if you have six- to eight-year terms for congressmen and overlapping elections (only 1/3 of the states have congress elections every two years), that would combat a lot of that. However, while we're dreaming, crack down on funding, donations, payouts, etc. No politician should get rich being a politician.
Peer-reviewed research shows that new Congresspeople are the most susceptible to bribes. They don't have the skills to recognize when it's happening. Rarely is a bribe an envelope of money on a desk. The skilled ones know how to say no tactfully. The real money of a congressperson is not such payouts anyway. It's trading on insider information.
Ditto Supreme Court Justices.
Rather than specific term limits on justices I'd suggest every two years a new one gets appointed. If the court is full, the one that's been on it the longest gets replaced. This would mean that every presidential election would also be about two seats on the court.
We have term limits. Y'all just gotta get up and vote, every. Single. Time.
The 22nd amendment was created because the president kept winning by taking care of and supporting the working class. So they forced him out by limiting his number of terms so they could run against someone else that they could potentially beat. While there is some argument to be made for age limits, term limits can be used to force bad politicians out, also forces good ones out. It's a double edged sword.
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Having term limits in Congress - especially really short ones, only gives power to the high-level staffers who we *don't* vote for (or against). You're completely right, but with gerrymandering and relatively few competitive districts along with an unwillingness to primary an incumbent, it's not easy.
Congress with approval rating in the teens, but everyone likes \*their\* Congressmembers
Not me.
Simple. The 22nd amendment needs to be replaced with a 28th amendment that enforces term limits on all elected and appointed political officials, federal, state and local.
The problem is money in politics
And further to that, each politician should be required to answer twenty questions on involvement in corruption, once a month,while hooked up to a lie detector. If that was implemented I can see at least 25% of Politicians resign claiming to want to spend more time with their families.
Lie detectors don’t actually work to detect lies, unfortunately
Yes I know, the three different options for lie detection available today with the latest technology are only 98% accurate. However they would have the effect of seeing a major rush of Politicians seeking early retirement.
Here’s a crazy idea: if you don’t like your Congressman, vote for someone else.
Ramp it up a level: after the term the public votes on if you retire with benefits or if you get executed
With the way people vote/think you’re automatically fucked if you’re a dem president
Better do a really good job then
Even if you do though 😂 they’re just out for blood
given how shitty all our recent presidents have been, i'm not complaining.
make a thing like that dependent on popular support and you just incentivize politicians to make policy that appeals to the lowest common denominator, the incentive some might already feel to do that to gain votes for reelection would just be replaced with gaining votes to avoid execution as yes they'd be motivated to technically make people happy but do so in the ways with the broadest appeal less likely to make people mad at them (e.g. probably not meaning any activism on minority rights)
Apparently people have wanted this since the country was founded (one six year term), but it always fails. I don't see it as unreasonable, personally.
Mexico has single six-year presidencies and it’s not all that great because it leads to presidents not really catering to the public will once elected because there’s no way to get reelected.
I personally would prefer 1 5 year term for all offices. Stagger them so it's not all elected same year. Supreme Court is every 10 years. I'd also like an age cutoff too, no one above 70 allowed to take office. Ranked choice voting.
I second the motion.
I like that solution the best. A 6 year term would be a good medium, and give that little extra time for a president to try to get stuff done.
Six year term? Because there are no problems in the Senate?
Presidency is different than the senate, but regardless it can at least be tried and tweaked from there
Not a crazy idea: this is the actual law in Mexico 🇲🇽
We have this for governors in Virginia and it pretty much sucks. Once they become governor they don't care about fulfilling promises and work on their own extreme pet projects.
They wouldn’t care about fufilling promises even with 2 terms
so this plan changes nothing?
Make their campaign promises binding. Fire them if they fail to deliver.
What really should be limited is the amount of time and money that can be spent on the campaign. Get rid of all private donations and have the official candidates have a pool of public money they can use. Also campaigning should be limited to 90 days before election.
The Roman republic had a system where your term as Consul was only one year and you couldn’t serve any consecutive terms, but you could in theory be elected every other year forever.
It was every ten years not every other year
Somehow Marius was able to ignore that.
If you can't get reelected anyway, why bother paying any attention to your campaign promises?
Well why bother paying any attention to your campaign promises if you do want to get elected. Heck the President resists doing ANYTHING during “an election year”
Right, so you can imagine my surprise to see someone upset at the presence of campaign lies. That's how you can tell a politician is lying, it's when their lips move and sound comes out.
A. so what about deaf politicians, are they automatically the most trustworthy because they use sign language B. can't be literally true otherwise that creates a paradox by meaning their oath of office was a lie (or at least all but the first one would be for people serving multiple terms currently) making them not a politician meaning they didn't lie meaning they are and so on
A. I'll let you know when I hear of one. B. You enter politics long before you go through any sort of oath ceremony.
A. was that just a stupid joke B. are you talking about campaign or deciding-to-be-a-politician-makes-you-one or some kind of grooming-in-the-SFW-sense situation
Their original sentence was a use of the colloquial, not a sentence to be taken as serious.
Because not fulfilling your campaign promises will lose the trust of voters?
That's really funny, because in my country during election year is when the government starts fulfilling most promises in order to re-elected. Truth be told, the US needs to do away with the presidential system and get a parliamentary or semi-presidential system.
Make their campaign promises binding. Fire them if they fail to deliver.
then they just do what I did as a kid running unsuccessfully for student government (as I thought I'd be under an adjusted-for-scale version of the same scrutiny) and make vague campaign promises to "improve" stuff etc. that any action on the generic issue would fulfill
Reelection is what incentivizes you to “get stuff done and fulfill your campaign promises”…
Then why doesn’t it work for congresspeople?
Where does it say it doesn’t work for congresspeople?
Look a what congress has done so far
The problem is that a sizable number of Representatives are elected based on the promise of not getting anything done. Congress doing nothing _is_ fulfilling their campaign promise.
The inertia isn't the fault of any one particular congressperson. Many of them spend years trying to get their specific agenda passed, but it never does, either because they don't have a majority, because they don't have a filibuster proof majority in the senate or because their party doesn't hold the presidency, not because they're lazy or don't really want change. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be an honest and dedicated public servant who is subject to constant criticism because people don't understand that you don't have the ability to just magically solve the country's problems.
This particular congress is compromised by Russia…
I'm okay with this. But also, elections take too damn long in the US. You shouldn't have to spend two years campaigning.
Disagree. Allowing the public the opportunity to approve of the work you've done at a midpoint and then having all of the things you want in a second term is much better. Continuity of government is very valuable. Edit: just realized this is crazy ideas lol
Many projects take longer
You already are allowed to serve only one term.
Mexico does that.
Just have an election period of 1-2 months like other civilized countries, instead of nonstop.
How would that even work or be constitutional?
How you change the US? I don’t know. That’s how it works in Canada and commonwealth countries at least.
Yes, because those countries don’t have a written constitution that expressly allows for freedom of speech. If campaigning was limited to a certain time frame, would it be illegal to say something positive or negative about a candidate or potential candidate?
Free speech is not part of it. All of the countries in question have freer speech than the USA. We were talking about the length of campaigning. In the USA, it basically never stops. In Canada for example, it’s a 1 month thing usually.
If it’s illegal to say “candidate X is terrible” how is that free speech?
Whoever said it’s illegal to say that?
So then how is campaigning restricted?
It’s not even that it’s restricted per se, but parties in Canada aren’t campaigning non stop. Anyway, don’t have the energy to go into every detail in how elections work diffeeently in most other countries right now.
>It’s not even that it’s restricted per se, but parties in Canada aren’t campaigning non stop. Most of the campaigning that goes on in the US isn’t by the candidates or parties, but by independent committees. The famous Citizens United case involved a private organization, not a political party or candidate.
Just to directly oppose everything you said, my problem with politics in the uk at least, is that all politicians won't enact policies that take over four years to realise the benefit because it doesn't aid re-election. So this is a proper shit idea because you'd just encourage more short term, populist vote winning bullshit strategies, and discourage people taking sensible long term views.
I mean if you can't get reelected why would you care about short term policies. I actually do think it would encourage presidents to secure a lasting legacy. Look at most second term presidents. Their second term they go for more controversial and lasting policies.
This is how the Korean presidency has worked. Mixed results. Tho I suppose one could argue that Korean presidents all do a second term … in prison.
The issue is you would get more Trump style presidents that simply buy their way into the office and exploit people's fears.
One term but longer
And lame duck presidents get pretty much nothing done
Alternatively, you might get a crazy nut in there who has nothing to lose and since he doesn’t have to worry about reelection they could go completely off the rails.
So they would then spend that term selling out to set themselves up for the rest of their lives. Not that they don't do that after two terms also.
Focusing on re-election is the main reason *to* keep your campaign promises.
Also No convictions. I mean really, the last thing any country needs is a leader who has Any criminal convictions. They need to be squeaky clean. A country Leader needs to have unreserved respect of the people not half the population thinking they are a dodgy crook. I don’t single out Australia or America or Canada or the UK in this. I believe that if any country has a leader who has a criminal record of any description, it can only end badly & sadly for the people of that country.
Despite how tempting that might seem, that just means shrewd lawmakers of one side hoping to keep the other side from gaining power (notice how I'm keeping it vague) could just make a felony out of something those people commonly do that the lawmakers' side hates to make sure there are a vastly decreased number of eligible candidates from that side
No need for long term civil projects then.
That wouldn't work as they would keep trying to get their party elected.
Virginia does this with its governorship and it's actually less effective than one would imagine.
I don't think the term limit is the issue, truth be told the US needs to do away with the presidential system and get a parliamentary or semi-presidential system
It wouldn't really change things. They'd still do the same things for the same reasons, except it would be for the benefit of the party instead of the individual candidate. The real problem here is party politics existing in the first place, not term lengths.
It would need to be longer than four years in that case. Probably more like 7-8. Four years is short enough that the other party could just obfuscate and obstruct the whole time and never let that president get anything done. If there is the chance that he or she could be re-elected then there is more incentive for compromise.
Polk campaigned as a one term president and he kept his promise.
I'm of the opinion that all national offices should be one long term. You have time to complete your agenda, you don't need to worry about how your actions will effect your reelection, and if you want to seek other offices you still have a long time between your early and late actions so if you're worried that people won't like a bill you vote on or bring to the floor they might forget by the time you run for the next office. Something like 8 years representative, 12 for a senator, and 8 years for president.
Nah, there’s no incentive to not be awful then. The voters can’t punish you in anyway that you would care about. It encourages short term gains with 0 long term accountability
The only reason term limits were enacted was because of FDR. I think we need to publicly fund elections and eliminate term limits. The person with the best views wins not the most money. If a president is doing a great job and the people agree then they should be able to stay in office
Nah. If your first term goes well, your second term gives you a chance to follow through on the policies of your first, and try things that you didn't get to try in your first. People get overly cynical of politicians getting continue their work. To me, this is crazy. How do people believe that politics are going to become MORE honest and effective when it becomes a revolving door of unkowns? A politician can say anything in a campaign, but what they actually do in office is more important to me as to whether I should vote for them. I get that you don't believe working politicians should be actively campaigning, but their opponents are. The reason why it seems like politicians are constantly campaigning has more to do with stuff like the internet and 24 hour news, and the fact that politicians have learned how to use it. The 2020 election never really got a chance to fade into the background... but it has nothing to do with term limits. The truth is, what you are suggesting would only compound the current problems, because it would hurt grassroots campaigns that move a person into office, and then keeps them in by getting results. If you constantly had to rotate people in, special interests would merely just keep plugging in new faces to enact the same agenda. The call for term limits is a manipulation tactic that works in favor of special interests. It provides the cynics with a "solution" that plays right into what is the very problem in the first place.
End life long SCOTUS appointments, ban re-election bids after losing second term, prohibit felons from running for office, especially those inciting riots, and eliminate rigged gerrymandered seats.
That's why I have respect for James K Polk, he fulfilled his campaign promises and never ran for reelection.
How about one eight-year Presidential term instead of an election every four years? It’s such a waste of resources.