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Term Limits

We need term limits for Congress and federal officials to restore accountability, break gerontocracy, and return power to the people.
Ken Whaley
Oct 08, 2025

Walk with me if you will into a Capitol hallway at midnight. Imagine the smell of stale coffee and the flickering of fluorescent lights. A staffer slides a thousand-page bill behind a door while the cameras role. And that rancid smell? It’s power gone sour. We didn’t build a republic so a handful of lifers could sit on committees for 30 years and decide the fate of people they’ve forgotten. The third pillar of Convention of States, which we’ll look at today, is Term Limits on Federal Officials, and it isn’t about punishment. It’s about rescue. Rescue from stagnation, from backroom cartels, from a political class that treats service like property rights. Enough Already!

Here’s what COS means in plain English: set hard, constitutional limits on how long federal power can be held. That includes members of Congress, and it reaches into the top layers of the federal bureaucracy, those “acting” and “permanent” officials who outlast presidents and write the rules you never voted for. COS backs a convention of the states under Article V to propose amendments that do exactly this: cap congressional tenure, cap senior executive-branch tenure, and cut off the slow drip of unearned, permanent authority. Read more or sign on at Convention of States and read Article V of the Constitution at https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/.

What does that look like for the country we actually live in? Picture a House where fresh eyes arrive often. Picture a Senate that rotates before it calcifies. Picture agency heads who cycle out before they become kings of fiefdoms. When the same faces control the levers for decades, the system bends around their habits, their donors, their fears. With term limits, the incentives flip. You get urgency. You get humility. You get people who still remember the price of eggs, the ache of a monthly mortgage payment, the smell of a shop floor at 5 a.m. Government stops being a museum of careers and starts being a workshop for solutions.

Let me get specific. A practical amendment model is simple and fair: three House terms and two Senate terms. Six years, twelve years. Enough time to learn, legislate, and leave before power turns to entitlement. Tie that to a lifetime cap on federal elected service so there’s no musical chairs between chambers. For the administrative state, cap the tenure of agency heads and senior rule-makers, ten years is generous. Add a cooling-off period before they can lobby the very offices they just ran. We can debate the exact numbers in the convention, but the principle stands: rotation by law, not by hope.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote, and he was right. Term limits are constitutional counterweights, not protest slogans. George Washington set the gold standard when he walked away after two terms in 1797. He could easily have stayed. He chose to go. That choice echoed for almost two centuries until we finally wrote it down in the Twenty-Second Amendment. If the presidency deserved a limit, why not Congress? Why not the powerful unelected hands that steer the ship while presidents come and go? The Founders feared concentrated, permanent power because it hardens into something that no longer hears the people. Look around. Do you feel heard? I know I sure don’t!

How do we get there without waiting on Congress to handcuff itself? (which it won’t ever do!) We use the process the Founders wrote for moments like this. Two-thirds of the states—thirty-four of them—pass the COS resolution limited to three topics: fiscal restraints, limiting federal power and jurisdiction, and placing term limits on federal officials. Congress must then call the convention. States send commissioners bound to that specific agenda. They debate. They draft. They vote to propose amendments. Nothing changes unless three-quarters of the states—thirty-eight of them—ratify each proposed amendment. It’s cautious by design. No shortcuts. No “runaway.” Just federalism doing its job. Start at https://conventionofstates.com to see how many states are already in and what your state needs to do next.

What does passage mean for everyday life? Fewer 2 a.m. omnibus deals written by leadership clubs you never chose. Fewer hearings that are theater first, oversight second. Fewer agencies that issue “interim final rules” like edicts from a palace. More citizen-legislators who arrive, work hard, and go home with ink-stained fingers and a clean conscience. More ideas tested in public, not traded in cloakrooms. If you hate the churn of permanent campaigns and permanent power, term limits are the obvious repair. They don’t fix every flaw, not even close. But they DO change the incentives, so the flaws no longer dominate.

I can already hear the objections. “We’ll lose expertise.” Spare me! The “expertise” that gave us endless continuing resolutions, 37 plus trillion-dollar deficits, and rules no one reads is not the kind of genius we should fear losing. Continuity lives in institutions, staff, and the text of law. Wisdom lives in the people who send their neighbors to serve and then welcome them home. If anything, term limits will break the cartel of committee chairs who treat jurisdiction like private land and guard it with lobbyist armies. Sunlight hates closed doors. So do term limits.

And yes, some raise the courts. Many scholars favor staggered terms for Supreme Court justices—often eighteen years—so no single White House can stack a generation. That debate belongs at the convention table, with care, restraint, and constitutional sobriety. I won’t pretend it’s simple and neither should you. But I will say this: rotation in power is a friend to liberty. Perpetuity in power is not. If we can write judicial reforms that honor independence while restoring public trust, we should at least have the courage to put real text on the page and make the case to thirty-eight states.

This is the last leg of Restore First Principle’s three-pillar series, and it’s the one that locks the others in place. We can limit federal jurisdiction, and we can restrain federal spending, but if the same old class holds the same old seats forever, the system will bend back to its bad habits. Term limits take the wheel from the permanent few and hand it back to the many, as I believe the founders intended. They make space for new leaders who aren’t welded to the past. They remind every official that the office belonged to the people before it ever belonged to them.

So, here’s the long game. We organize in every state. We press for the COS resolution, text-matched to the three pillars. We demand that our legislators file it, move it, and vote on it. We keep writing. We keep calling. We show up. When thirty-four states pass it, we send men and women who can argue with steel in their spine and the Constitution in their hands. We make the case to America that rotation is not chaos. It is order restored. And when thirty-eight states ratify, we put a period where the political class wanted a comma.

Please, listen for a just a second. That quiet ticking you hear in Washington DC? It’s comfortable power dozing off. Let’s wake it up. Madison left us the mechanism. Washington left us the model. The people left themselves the duty. Rotation is not radical. It is a Constitutional Republican in action. It is accountable. I say It is long overdue.

This isn’t complicated my friends!

Link to original article in Restore First Principles in Substack:

https://substack.com/inbox/post/174025715

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Created:	2025-10-13 17:33 GMT
Updated:	2025-10-19 13:13 GMT
Published:	2025-10-13 17:50 GMT
Converted:	2025-11-11 12:07 GMT
Change Author:	Ken Whaley
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