#1 INTRODUCTION TO TENURECORRUPTS.COM

www.tenurecorrupts.com

I guess my first blog ought to explain how I got started on this Congressional Term Limits Amendment (CTLA) kick.

I am a retired manufacturing engineer who always enjoyed my job so much that I spent too much time at work (just ask my wife!), and am now enjoying my retirement, looking for ways to do something useful.

As I settled in and started paying more attention to current events and politics, I noticed that politicians in Congress seem to be developing the ability to get reelected almost 100% of the time, while across the country statewide term limits are becoming more and more popular, and getting enacted with very large majorities. Almost half the states now have term limits, and most of them got it thru the ‘Initiative’ process, whereby the voters put it on the ballot and then passed it, thus by-passing their legislatures who would never have voted for limiting their own terms.

Almost all the states which have an Initiative process have enacted statewide term limits. Doesn’t that tell you something ?

At the Federal level, we have a term limited President, and a Judiciary appointed for life, but in between, we have a Congress which the Founders expected would have a reasonable turnover as voters reassessed their Representatives every two years, and their Senators every six years. That’s the way it worked for our first 150 years. Successful reelections ran about 55-60 %. Nowadays, successful reelections run about 98 %. Like college professors, Congress has tenure !

Commonsense tells us that this is NOT because legislators have become more endearingly popular.

No. It is because politicians have learned many tricks to control the system in their favor. And because a significant fraction of the electorate do not pay enough attention to politics to vote on the merits of the issues or of the candidates. Instead, in the voting booth, they vote on the ballot names they recognize, rather than for a name they do not recognize, and who they might have preferred it they knew the issues.

This ‘significant fraction’ of the voters, in closely balanced elections such as we have had lately, unwittingly maintains a ‘status quo drag’ on the outcome of elections, which resists change and favors incumbents in both parties.

That’s why we need a Congressional Term Limits Amendment (CTLA)