My solution for term limits
12 years in federal government, and you have to meet certain qualifications
The vast majority of those on the right favor term limits. Many “independents” and some on the left do as well. My plan is pretty simple, even if I’m not the first to propose it. I’ve got some additional details/restrictions to help nail it down. You get a maximum of 12 years in federal office. If you get elected president you get up to 16 years. (No I’m not suggesting more than 2 terms as president, just a combo where being president gives you 4 extra years.)
So if you first run for the House, and win 3 terms there, that’s 6 years so you would then only be eligible for one 6 year Senate term. If you run for the House a 4th time and win you’re now at 8 years and you’re not eligible to run for Senate at all. Of course with 2 year terms you can serve 6 terms in the House total. Then it’s either run for president where you could be eligible for just one 4 year term, or you’re retired from the federal government.
Of course this means if you serve 2 terms in the Senate you’re also either done or you can be president for one term. If you want to be eligible for 2 presidential terms, you can only serve one Senate term or a max of 4 House terms. Time spent in a presidential cabinet also works against your 12 years or 16 years. So if you somehow spent 8 years as Secretary of State, or 4 years as SoS and then 4 years as Secretary of Defense (to list just 2 examples), you’re only got 4 years left to serve in the house, or you can run for president for one term.
And your spouse can’t then run after you. His or her limit is used up with your time in office, even if you weren’t married when you first held office, and even if you divorce later. If you’ve got political aspirations as an office holder, don’t marry someone already in office. Being a “common law” wife or husband of an office holder would also rule you out if they exhausted all of their years.
I’ve talked about requiring qualifications for office before, and we need those as well. To be eligible for the Senate you would have to have run a business before, or otherwise managed a fairly decent sized department at a large company, where you had to deal with budgeting in particular, as well as making critical decisions for some part of the business. Working as a community agitator like Obama would absolutely NOT qualify you for Senate, not even if you ran the entire organization. It would have to be a successful for profit business where budgets and deadlines have to be met.
For the House the requirements would be looser, but you would still have to have at least 6 years of solid job experience. I’m open to suggestions on details.
For president you would need to have lead a successful company with at least 500 employees if not more, or been a C level or VP executive at a company with 1000 or more employees, and the company would have had to be profitable for the majority of the time you were there. Successfully running a good size state as governor would also qualify you. If you can’t successfully run a fairly large company or a state, you’ve got zero business being the leader of the free world!
A solid knowledge of U.S. history, and of the Constitution, would be required of all office holders and of all cabinet level position holders. Just think about how many feckless office holders right now would be ineligible!
And think about how much corruption is cut out by ending 30, 40, and 50 years worth in government and all the corruption that goes along with that. To improve things even more, add in some previous solutions I’ve mentioned:
For good measures, add on a maximum of 20 years in office anywhere, including state level and mayor level. And how about no siblings in federal government at the same time either, and no other family members eligible for president at all after one has been president?