thunder wrote:

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 13:14:50 +0000, Dave Hall wrote:

The founding fathers on our constitiution recognized this tendancy,
and that's why they created our system of checks and balances.
That's also why we have things like "term limits". I noticed that
Bill Clinton, of all people, has been making noise about removing or
modifying that limit, as of late. I don't see much good to come from
that.

I've never understood the reasoning behind term limits. If we are
doing our job as an electorate, an ineffective legislature would be
gone. In a democracy, we do get the leadership we deserve. It
seems to me, all term limits do is limit our choices, in the rare
case we actually get an effective and honorable leader.


You bring up a good point. The reason for term limits is so that no one
can "monopolize" the government for longer than their term limit. This
is supposedly done so that someone cannot be "corrupted" by years of
accumulated political "connections", and the overwhelming tendancy
toward favoratism, that these "connections" often lead to.

Opponents bring up the cases where we get a (increasingly rare)
politician, who becomes polpular, and his policies are effective and
positive for our society. The "he's doing a great job, why should he be
forced to step down" scenario. If we, the citizens, are doing our civic
duty, and making responsible choices, and the system is relatively free
of corruption and "dirty" tricks, in theory we would be able to remove
those who are not doing a good job. The problem is that most of the
people who even bother to vote, are often not the most informed people,
and they decide their vote based on superficial "qualities", and the
sound byte issues that are spoon fed to them.

I guess what term limits really mean, is that we don't trust our own
system to take care of itself, and that we need an additional "safety
valve".

Dave