Update as of April 2008: This website was started in 2004 to get Term Limits for Congress. Since then, I have become convinced that, in spite of the overwhelming sentiment in the country in favor, there is no way that Congress will allow us to have an amendment stop their gravy train. So we must change our tactics.
One way they can't stop us is...by our vote...to NEVER REELECT anyone in Congress. Never! In either House, in either party, good guys or bad guys, NEVER REELECT them!
I am committed to spend the rest of 2008, and 2010, and beyond, toward convincing the country to follow this strategy until we get the old professional politicians out of Congress, so that ordinary Americans can run for, and win, seats in Congress by means of free Internet ads and local popular support, without special interest funding, to make a 'citizen Congress'.
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STRATEGIES (As of Apr 2008)
To achieve Congressional Term Limits
Lots of people who would ordinarily vote for Congressional Term Limits if they had a chance to, tend to consider it a lost cause because they ‘know’ that we will never get Congress to act on it. On the other hand, I believe that, given the fact that a significant majority (80%?) of the voters already tend to favor term limits (in the states, it wins overwhelmingly every time it is voted on!), then it only needs an organized aggressive effort to help it succeed.
TENURECORRUPTS.COM wants to collect many strategies. One of them, or some combination of them, is sure to do the trick!
Please send in your ideas. (go to Contact)
SOME IDEAS FOLLOW:
•(As of Apr 2008) NEVER REELECT
•BASIC (Tidal Wave)
•NORMAL (State Initiative)
•ARTICLE V CONVENTION (Art-Con)
•THE JUDICIAL REVERSAL
•THE NATIONAL STATEWIDE TERM LIMITS
•THE NATIONAL CHAINMAIL LETTER
•THE INSTITUTIONAL GROUP
•THE DRASTIC ANTI-INCUMBENT
• NEVER REELECT (sledgehammer)
This strategy, adopted specifically for the 2008 election season and thereafter, focuses on the idea that we the people need to take matters into our own hands. We must make a special effort to deliberately vote in every election, always voting for challengers, never voting for incumbents, without distinction or mercy, all parties, good guys or bad guys.
To some people this may appear to be an irresponsible tactic, and I agree that it may appear so for the short term. On the other hand, it is really "fighting fire with fire", since career politicians are grimly and ruthlessly fighting to hold on to their seats forever with all the means at hand: preventing votes on term limits, voting for biased redistricting, doling out ridiculous earmarks(in quality and quantity), refusing to solve longstanding problems, or passsing bad law, in order to placate and bribe special interests for funding, etc.
• BASIC STRATEGY (Tidal Wave)
Note: This 'Tidal Wave' strategy (coupled with the 'Grandfather' form of amendment) is MY preferred choice of strategies, the one I believe has the greatest chance of success, and the one I will be pushing until someone convinces me otherwise... I'll add other viable strategies for consideration and discussion as they are suggested by people who signup and/or submit their ideas.( Contact )
1. First, TENURECORRUPTS.COM will build a list of like-minded citizens, at least a few from every Congressional district in the country (435 districts). This will probably take a couple of years to accomplish. In addition to ordinary people, we'll enlist bloggers, editorialists, columnists, organizations, etc. and possibly other Term Limits groups.
2. Educate and prepare these Signups to believe in the effectiveness of a single simultaneous action by all of them, at the appropriate time, to achieve our goal. This will require patience. It would be useless to go off prematurely and half-cocked.
3. When we believe that we have signed up enough email addresses, this website (tenurecorrupts.com) will mass-email all signups to simultaneously email their Congressional Representative and their two Senators, demanding that Congress passes a Constitutional Amendment to limit the terms in both houses of Congress. (We will provide standard email formats, media addresses, and Congressional email addresses to make it easier to do).
4. At the same time, Signups will be asked to cc these emails to their local and national news media, TV/radio stations, and Bloggers to alert them that this event is taking place. If we do it right, I'm sure the media will consider it an unusually newsworthy event, and give it extra attention. We'll specifically include bloggers (and the whole blogosphere) in this action. (We will provide email addresses for many of these too.)
5. Depending on who occupies the White House at the time, perhaps the President might be persuaded to use the ‘bully pulpit’ to help us. After all, his job has been term limited for the last 50 years! (actually 200 years!) So why not Congress? A second-term President would have little to lose by helping us.
6. And, just in case it doesn’t work the first time, we can do it every two years, about 3-6 months before each Congressional election, to make sure they hear us! We’ll call it CTLA Day! (for Congressional Term Limits Amendment day)
• NORMAL STRATEGY (State Initiative)
This strategy requires that two campaigns be mounted (in tandem) to:
1. Establish the Initiative process in the other 25 or so states which do not have it; and
2. Mount efforts in all states get voters to petition their legislatures to place a Congressional Term Limits Amendment (CTLA) on their ballot to force the state to ask Congress to pass the CTLA.
If 'enough' (maybe 10 or 15) state legislatures are moved to press Congress to pass CTLA, the momentum will gather, and it should happen. The fear is, that if Congress ignores the request of a number of legislatures on this matter, then it will prompt a response from the required two-thirds of the states to formally call for a Constitutional Convention (Con-Con) as stated in Article V of the Constitution. All hell could break loose then. Many people are terrified that a 'Con-Con' could spin out of control. Sober thinking reveals that this is nonsense.
Because this strategy requires too many focussed efforts in too many states, I personally don't opt for this one, altho' I would heartily support any efforts in this direction. National Initiative in USA?
In fact, this effort could start in the 21 states which already have the Initiative process. If it is successful in any significant fraction of those states, it would start a national dialog to get the ball rolling in all the remaining states.
• ARTICLE V CONVENTION STRATEGY (Art-Con)
This one is similar to the Initiative strategy, except that it goes directly for the greatly feared Article V Convention (previously called the Constitutional Convention). It would have the advantage of being a more focussed single issue campaign, but would be easily tarred and feathered by scare tactics like "Who knows what could happen in a runaway convention? It could be the end of the Republic !".That is hysterical crap !
Don't believe that scare stuff. Any proposed constitutional amendment must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states (38), a very, very tough hurdle in a country with as much common-sense as our America. I'd consider this strategy as my second choice. For more info go to www.foavc.org
• THE JUDICIAL REVERSAL STRATEGY
Another strategy which may enable the advent of Congressional Term Limits is reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1995 controversial 5-4 decision (US Term Limits vs Thornton), that the states do not have the right to determine the terms of their Congresspeople. What has happened to State's Rights and the 10th amendment? This was a flawed decision and should be reversed.
At the time of this 5 to 4 ruling, 14 states had already passed term limits for their Congresspeople, and 11 more had scheduled ballot initiatives to do so for the next election. There is little doubt, considering the general feeling in the country in favor of term limits, that once 50% of the states had done so , the rest of the nation would follow shortly.
Despite the recent furor in Congress over the filibustering of judicial nominees, it appears that due to the ages and infirmities of some of the incumbent justices, that there will be some new appointments to the Court during 2005, '06 and '07. Should the Administration succeed in getting confirmation of 2 or 3 relatively conservative justices (‘strict constructionists’), it would not be surprising to see new challenges reach the Court defending the right of states to set term limits for their congressional contingent.
The most likely means for reversing the Thornton ruling could be the use of the 10th Amendment which states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Many people believe that Justice Stevens really stretched his interpretation of the 10th amendment to deny the states the right to specify their qualifications of their representatives to the Congress. (Justice Thomas wrote a powerful demurral)
• THE NATIONAL STATEWIDE TERM LIMITS STRATEGY
A fifth strategy, which is actually already well underway, is to focus on creating 'movements' in all the states which have not yet enacted statewide term limits for their legislators. The voters in about 20 states have enacted such term limits and have been fighting valiantly to keep the politicians and the courts from overturning them, and they are generally winning repeat votes by large margins. It tells you something when it is only the politicians and the lobbying groups who are on the side of cancelling term limits. The courts usually win only on technicalities, so it behooves our side to be extremely careful in wording the ballot propositions.
But doesn't it make simple common sense that, if enough state legislatures are term limited, they will say: "If we are term limited, why not Congress ?" Then they will call on Congress to either vote for Term Limits, or demand a Constitutional Convention to debate the matter. It would take only 34 states to force Congress' hand.
• THE NATIONAL CHAINMAIL LETTER STRATEGY
This idea has the potential to create a geometric progression landslide of 'snailmail' (1 to 5 friends, 5 to 25 friends , 25 to 125, 125 to 625, etc) to bury Congress with convincing evidence that voters really want action. AND it has the special advantage that, if done entirely by 'snailmail', it cannot be blocked, like email is blocked by spam blockers and politicians. The trick here would be to get a nation of emailers to do it by snailmail.
• THE INSTITUTIONAL GROUP STRATEGY
This would involve the job of enlisting the services of sympathetic national institutions such as Cato, Heritage, and major national media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall St Journal, etc, to periodically publish articles/editorials which would bring the issue to the public's attention. We could also urge our local radio/TV talk shows to have panel discussions about Congressional Term Limits.
• THE DRASTIC ANTI-INCUMBENT STRATEGY
If all else fails, we can resort to the truly drastic strategy, in EVERY election, of ALWAYS VOTING THE INCUMBENT OUT, whoever he/she is, Democrat or Republican, good or bad, whether he/she has served 1, 2, or 10 terms. If we succeed in making a small dent in the reelection rate of 99%, then maybe they will get the message that, if they want to serve at least a reasonble two or three terms, they had better give us some kind of Congressional Term Limits Amendment. This is currently being organized as a national movement by voidnow.org , One-Simple-Idea.com , and others.
In addition, when possible, ALWAYS vote for the candidate who pledges, if he is elected, to sponsor and vote for bills which call for an Amendment for Congressional Term Limits, even if he/she is not of your favorite party. And if they break their pledge, vote them out next election. In the long run this will do the job.
Being a very optimistic, upbeat kind of guy, I normally wouldn’t go for such a negative means of solving this problem, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I really think this would work, if only we gave it enough publicity, and tenacity.
To summarize, we now can count on at least 8 viable strategies for Congressional Term Limits. WHO SAYS IT CAN'T BE DONE ???
WANT TO SUGGEST OTHER STRATEGIES ? : Contact
| ContactMedia |
(Bio) Who am I? My name is Nelson Lee Walker, retired engineer, 87 yrs young, who is determined to make a difference for our country. I'd like your help.
What am I trying to do?
The name of this site says it all. The professional career politicians in Congress are destroying our great country. A 'CitizenCongress' would be healthier for our republic. We need Term Limits in Congress. The Arguments page may convince you. The Act Now! page will suggest how to help
Click here to copy/paste the above logo to your website
Selected Articles
Archive (by others)
Archive (my youtube)
Archive 2008
Archive 2007
Archive 2006 (2nd half)
Archive2006 (2nd qtr)
Archive 2006 (1st qtr)
Archive 2005
Other Term Limits SITE Links
Get Out of Our House (Goooh.com)
Friends of Article V Convention
Citizens for Term Limits
Vote Out Incumbents Democracy
US Term Limits
One-Simple-Idea
No-Incumbents.org
congressionaltermlimits.net
State Data
State Term Limit Statistics
National Initiative in USA ?
Direct Democracy Initiatives Site
Considercommonsense
Good Books on Term Limits
Restoration by George F Will
Breach of Trust by SenTomCoburn
Why Term Limits? byJohnC.Armor
The Trust Committed to Me by
ex Congrman Mark Sanford
(now Gov South Carolina}
Other Term Limits Articles
What makes a GOOD Voter ?
Will v Broder on Term Limits
USTL v Thornton
Local Term Limits History
PBasham Cato '04
RPilon WSJ Jan 97
Bandow '96 Cato #259
The Great Con-Con Hoax
Con-Con is Dangerous !
Cato Handbook for Congress
JFund Oct90 Cato #141
Bandow '95 Cato #221
Lowry - Erosion of Democracy
MIT article in favor '94
Cato Congress vs Competition
Heritage Term Limits Only Way
Cato #328
Congress For Life ?
Columns by Paul Jacob
Cato Buckley Mar 2000
National Initiative in USA ?
Direct Democracy Initiatives Site
