Why Term Limits?

A friend of mine who could have done anything with his life explained to me one day why he considered and rejected the notion of a career in politics.  He believes that once elected, and you go to Washington and walk the halls of the Capitol for the first time, lobbyists and women both throw themselves at you.  No mere moral can withstand the temptation for any appreciable period of time.  There is no way to go to Washington without becoming at least a little corrupt.

And so when Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at NYU, speculates that we should eliminate presidential term limits, I wonder what he believes restrains political corruption.  A President who has persuaded the American People to make him a perpetual executive eventually answers to no one, and the longer they hold office, the deeper their political ties run, and the harder it becomes to separate them from the American imagination. This is but part of the anatomy of corruption, and how tyrants come to their notorious misdeeds.

Zimmerman starts his column with questionable logic.  He quotes from 1947, Senator Harley Kilgore, not surprisingly a Democrat, who said:

"The executive's effectiveness would be seriously impaired," when explaining his staunch opposition to what was then a proposed constitutional amendment enforcing the decency every American President supported until FDR.  Kilgore continued, "as no one will obey and respect him if he knows that the executive can not run again."

For more than a century American Presidents followed George Washington's example of limiting their tenure to two terms, be they consecutive or no. Every American President from Washington to Hoover agreed that two terms was enough. FDR changed that, not coincidentally as Progressivism reached a certain maturity.  Democrats clearly do not appreciate or respect the wholly illiberal wages of deference to authority, and that defines the battle politic as we now know it.  Is our power distributed amongst the hundreds of millions of American Peoples, or is it focused on a relatively small group of people who work, in the worst case, 4,805 miles from the remotest American city in an actual State?  (Naalehu, HI).  Progressives from both parties yearn for the latter, for it is the only way to implement narrowly defined, singular visions of governance.  Presidential term limits are designed specifically to prohibit Presidents from gaining unlimited power over us.  Such limits are the only way to confine any one individual's impact on our lives.

As a libertarian, I should abhor term limits. But the systematic, unavoidable corruption that defines American politics demands a constant check.  Mere humans can not be trusted with more power and authority than the Constitution grants, and even that power and authority should be strictly monitored by a persistent and diligent people.