Good people can disagree about term limits.
It’s not a moral issue, but about practical governance.
I love term limits, while my friend Lew Rockwell, the former Ron Paul aide who started the Mises Institute and runs the popular website LewRockwell.com, isn’t a fan.
In a brief post to his site, entitled “The Term Limit Hoax,” Rockwell lamented that “Term limits apply only to the institutionally weakest branch of government, the legislature, to further weaken it, and never to the presidential bureaucracy, which actually runs the government, nor to the judges. It’s why neocons, those ultimate presidential supremacists, love term limits.”
This is the classic logical fallacy of guilt by association. Neoconservatives breathe air, too. Should the rest of us turn blue?
Usually if politicians — neocon or otherwise — claim amorous feelings for limits, as the late Bob Novak warned, “They’re lying.” Yet, most regular folks — all races, genders, political parties, levels of neocon-ness, you-name-it — actually do want term limits.
Lew’s correct: Congress is weak. It was designed to be the strongest branch, holding the all-important purse strings and a law-making monopoly. Yet, career politicians have shrunk from fulfilling the First Branch’s constitutional role, consistently handing more and more power to the executive branch and the courts.
That’s not the result of term limits, but a lack thereof.
Why is there “never” a push for term limits on the “presidential bureaucracy”? Well, those bureaucrats don’t even have terms as such. And any limits would have to be legislated by Congress. Congress enacted that bureaucracy, every cubicle of it, and the longer congressmen stay in Washington, the more they champion it.
Limit judges? A term-limited Congress might help there, too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Coming to Terms with A Logical Fallacy”
Term limits are arguably good, but cannot solve the problems of expanding and intrusive government, and the reciprocal loss of freedom, alone.
The US Constitution attempted to define and limit the powers of the federal government, and we are experiencing the failure of that attempt.
It now appears the only means to limit the “modern” government is by controlling its available resources, including borrowing,
Power always follows the money and with the creation of the largest economic entity in the history of mankind in Washington, it is flowing to and concentrating there.
I propose a balanced budget amendment, coupled with a limitation, hopefully declining over time, on the percentage of the GDP that the government can tax, distribute, regulate, mandate the spending of, or in any manner control.
That appears to be the only means to eventually stop its proliferation and intrusion, and restore liberty and freedom to where they were intended to in the initial contract was made to create these United States.
Term limits are useful but only in moderation. Meaning, I believe the terms should be on the order of eight years. At least six. In Michigan we’ve had some excellent pro-liberty legislators term limited out of office after four years. What’s the arguable countering benefit? That a bunch of establishment horses’ rear ends have to circulate to other government offices. My current state legislator and my current county commissioner (Oakland County, Michigan) simply rotated jobs at the previous election. They’re part of the insider Republican statist machinery.
My feeling is the only way to get control of runaway government is thru restoration of fully empowered grand juries to investigate and indict the plethora of government crimes.
While there are no term limits on Executive Branch appointments, there is the 22nd Amendment that term limits the President.