Short Term Limits Essay

3956 Words8 Pages

Stafford High School

Term limits control how politicians work and how they view their job

Christian Werner Carrara
ECE Political Science
Mr. Shearer Most people have known about the more recent constitutional amendment that deals with term limits. The 22nd amendment prohibits the President of the United States from being elected more than two terms (22nd Amendment 1). This amendment was made in response to the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was reelected, for the 3 time, to his 4th consecutive term as president. Unfortunately, Roosevelt died in office in his fourth term and this ended what could have been a “career Presidency.” That is exactly why congress passed the 22nd amendment, to stop people from …show more content…

This has caused a lack of leaders and lack of knowledge of the legislator’s job. The short term limits have caused tremendous turnover of legislators who are enter the state or town legislature. With the lack of legislators with experience from years of being in the State Legislature there are no real leaders who could teach the new legislator how to run the legislature. Many leaders are first year legislators who run due to the lack of availability of veteran legislators who were in the legislature for a long time. With the first year status, the leaders have trouble controlling or influencing their house of the state legislature. The good of the term limits is it makes the leadership races very contested due to the lack of voting or determining beforehand, because there is no beforehand so the leadership hopefuls have to run and run against multiple people. With the majority of leadership races relying on re-election and raising money are more important than “... the value of legislative experience and institutional knowledge—factors that played a key role in leadership selection before term limits—is neutralized by term limits.” (Bowser, Chi, and Little 8). The value of legislative experience and institutional knowledge is extremely limited which is a problem, because the government is lacking on knowledge on how to its job, but with leaders, who can, being re-elected leaders who have prior knowledge the government becomes more

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