11/13/16
Of all the things Donald Trump said he would do when he
became president, far and away the most important was the institution of term
limits for Congress. Term limits would
forever alter the thinking of those who get elected to Congress and never find
their way back home. If a House member
knew that he would eventually have to live with the laws that he passes, perhaps
he would look at those laws and their consequences more carefully. If a Senator knew that a career in politics
were just about impossible, perhaps that career would not be the foremost thing
in her mind and she would not be so desperate for the cash needed to sustain such
a career…and not so willing to make the compromises with one’s principles that
come attached to that money.
Term limits would break, even destroy, the political
careerist mindset, and it was the rejection of, and the revulsion at, the
professional politicians and their condescending and usually misguided way of
thinking that made Mr. Trump President-elect Donald Trump. Therefore, the most important thing that Mr.
Trump must do to deliver on his promises is not tax cuts, a border wall, a war
on ISIS, renegotiation of trade deals or a sweeping reform of the regulatory
structure in Washington. Mr. Trump must
work ardently and incessantly for term limits to be true to his candidacy, to
those who made it successful, and to his political reason for being.
However…
Mr. Trump must wait, perhaps longer than any of us would
like, to make the big push for term limits.
There are two reasons that Mr. Trump must move gingerly on what should
be his most important policy initiative.
First, the chances of his actually achieving term limits are close to
nil because such limits would have to be passed by people who would be voting
themselves out of a job, certainly the best job they could ever have; it’s hard
to beat making a highly remunerative living getting one’s hindquarters smooched. Even if one were to grandfather all existing
officeholders in a term limits proposal, the pols still would not go along with
such a proposal; note the opposition among senior citizens to proposed changes
to Social Security despite their being grandfathered in every serious Social
Security reform proposal that has come down the pike.
Second, pushing for a term limits amendment, either
through the Congress or through a Constitutional convention, would certainly
antagonize the Congress. While most of us have little problem
antagonizing Congress, doing so makes no sense from a practical perspective if
one wants to get things done. If the
Congress knows, rather than merely suspects, that Mr. Trump would like to throw
them all out of office, their enthusiasm for working with him would doubtless
wane. Why antagonize people you will
need, especially if antagonizing them is, from a practical perspective,
pointless?
So as much as those of us who voted for Mr. Trump would
consider his presidency a failure, and our votes as misguided, if he were to
abandon term limits altogether, he ought to put such limits on the proverbial
backburner. He ought to first push for
the easy things, the things on which he can gather bi-partisan support, like
corporate tax reform and infrastructure spending. Go for the relatively easy stuff,
accumulate power and chits, develop a sense of inevitability and the pointlessness
of resistance, then go for the big things.
The biggest of all the big things is term limits. Achieving this goal may ultimately prove
impossible, but making an honest, forthright, and vigorous pursuit of this
perhaps quixotic goal would point out to many of us that Mr. Trump is indeed
not a closet member of “the club” and has heard the calls and cries of those
who are simply fed up with the political professional’s mindset and all the
damage it has one to our once great nation.
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