WI Term Limit in Bill of Rights?

I've searched the forums and I can't find this topic so I got this topic for discussion. What if a two term limit was included in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution when the Constitution was ratified. How might history been altered?
 
Why would that be in the Bill of Rights? Just have it be in the original constitutional draft that was passed and published.
 
Why would it have to be in the Bill of Rights and not just written into the Constitution already? I'm also guessing that in such an act there would be term limits on the President as well as the Congress.

Its not even a 'right' that would be exercised by most people.
 
Sorry about that, I may have been a bit misleading on my question but still what if a limit had been an early amendment say during Washington's first term?
 
Still though it would be interesting to see how the US would develop without people like John C Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster etc as "Senators for life".
 

JohnJacques

Banned
Still though it would be interesting to see how the US would develop without people like John C Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster etc as "Senators for life".

True. But you would need an impetus after the Constitution was made for something like that to be considered.

Note that the constitution was made against a backdrop of "rule by the betters." Suffrage was limited by property and wealth, and members of the government were supposed to rule for the sake of the people, not for their will. Democracy was a dirty word.

As such, the idea of permanence in Congress simply made sense. There can only be so many betters.

I'm thinking Jackson would be a good figure to try for such an amendment. He was the first one who really viewed the office as "the will of the people". Get him into a feud with some long-serving Senators and not just Thomas Hart Benton's duel) and have his Young Turks carry it out.
 
Note that the constitution was made against a backdrop of "rule by the betters." Suffrage was limited by property and wealth, and members of the government were supposed to rule for the sake of the people, not for their will. Democracy was a dirty word.

As such, the idea of permanence in Congress simply made sense. There can only be so many betters.

Also selection and election of Senators were with their respective state governments, not with the people. The Progressives later in the 19th century screwed that balance up.
 
The main argument for -Direct Election of Senators- was to get Big Money and Special Interests out of Politics:D, and limit the number of times a Senator was reappointed.:p
Whe all know how well that worked.:rolleyes:
 
There was some precedent to term limits in 1787: in 1776, 5 states (Delaware, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, and Massachusetts) included term limits in their constitutions. Indeed, the Articles of Confederation included a stipulation that persons could only serve as Representatives to the Congress for 3 years in any given 6 year period (a common style of limit in the period). However, such limits (particularly this one) became an impediment to effective government.

While both the New Jersey and Virginia Plans included term limits, they were tabled by the Philadelphia Convention because both schemes "enter[ed] too much into detail for general propositions."* However, term limits in the Founders opinion was supposed to deal with breaking up dangerous concentrations of power, rather than preventing the rise of career politicians (an anachronistic concept in 1787).

Nevertheless, IIRC, some Anti-Federalists did strongly object to the lack of term limits in the Constitution. However, having term limits in the Bill of Rights would mean that the Federalists allowed the Anti-Feds to get more than just the insertion of Rights into the Amendments, but also structural changes, in which case term limits wasn't the highest priority for Anti-Feds (limiting the authority to tax probably would have been).

IMO term limits are an ineffective guarantee of democratic responsiveness. It would be far better to have a workable system to ensure the vast majority of House elections were competitive on a regular basis. Madison thought elections would take care of this by themselves. The experience of the 20th century, however, suggests that some kind of scheme would be needed to check excesses of gerrymandering and the like. That would make for a good inclusion in the Bill of Rights, but the question is how to structure it so as to avoid ineffectual vagueness and over-specificity. This was what doomed the originally proposed 1st Amendment, to delineate a formula to determine the size of the House: the mechanism was fairly complicated and could either have produced a needlessly large house (5,000+ members today) or a very small one depending on how one interpreted it. Additionally, one could argue that including such a formula in the Constitution was an attempt to include just such a guarantee.

Also, I feel certain that there are some discussions of term limits out there. For example, this one between myself and Thande.
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* By the way, you can access Madison's accounts of the Constitutional Convention's debates at the Avalon Project at Yale Law School: check here for the specific citation for this topic.
 
Is it reasonable to imagine term limits in the House of Representatives, but not the Senate? That seems to be in line with the intent of both bodies.
 
Is it reasonable to imagine term limits in the House of Representatives, but not the Senate? That seems to be in line with the intent of both bodies.

Representatives were viewed as "citizen legislators" who would go to Washington for a time and then return being regular citizens afterwards. Limiting the number of terms one could serve in the House, to say 5 2-year does seem reasonable.

Virginia, like several other states, asserted that " ... the members of the [legislative and executive branches of government] may be restrained from opprression by feeling and participating in the public burdens, they should, at fixed periods be reduced to a private station, return to the mass of the people; and the vacancies be suplied by certain and regular elections; in which all or any part of the former members to be elegible or inelegible, as the rule of the Constitution of Government, and the laws shall direct."

Could Article I Section 5 of the Constitution, which does grant the House and Senate the power to judge the qualifications of its own members, be interpreted as empowering the House and Senate to enact term limits on their own? Perhaps a phrase could have been added to this section stating, "Each house may set a limit on the number of consecutive terms that its members may serve."
 
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Could Article I Section 5 of the Constitution, which does grant the House and Senate the power to judge the qualifications of its own members, be interpreted as empowering the House and Senate to enact term limits on their own?

Based on Case Law, the ability to judge the qualifications of members has only extended to 1) judging the returns of the race and 2) ensuring that all members meet the minimum criteria laid out in the Constitution (age limit, residence requirement, etc.). The Supreme Court has held the House or Senate couldn't invent other requirements.

However, both Houses have the authority to expel a member by a 2/3 vote, so they could promise to expel all members who have served over certain time limit. But this policy would be hard to construe as a rule since expulsion was conceived of as a form of punishment and hence would have to be on a case by case basis, rather than contingently exercised by using this power to make a rule to exercise the power at a future date.

Perhaps a phrase could have been added to this section stating, "Each house may set a limit on the number of consecutive terms that its members may serve."

Well, that might work, but setting the rules of debate (over which each house has autonomy) and setting term limits are very different. The former guards legislative independence. The latter, however, is meant to check potential abuses/concentrations of power. Expecting incumbents to check themselves runs counter to the usual methodology of checks and balances.
 
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