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I used to be strongly anti-term limits and when they were being pushed heavily back in the early 1990's, I saw them more or less as an undemocratic ploy by Republicans and conservatives to legislate the end of the Democrats' majority in Congress and, in a technical sense, we DO have term limits in the form of regular elections. However, I would argue that very few races seem to be truly competitive because of the massive amounts of money one must raise and spend just to run for elected office. True, there are the occasional upsets where challengers somehow manage to unseat entrenched politicians but more often than not unless the incumbent politician becomes massively unpopular due to a scandal, bad votes, or controversial policies, it seems next to impossible to effectively challenge entrenched politicians for most people. Of course, ceding more power to lobbyists seems like an even worse proposition and, frankly, I personally believe that people should, as a basic democratic principle, be allowed to elect whomever they want to represent them as many times as they want and anything less just doesn't seem compatible with a (still mostly) democratic country. Of course, Presidents and some other executive-branch officeholders ARE term limited, which doesn't always seem quite fair nor democratic but, in light of Presidents like Bush, I'm not sure that I'd want the same people, Republican OR Democratic with that much power running the country for a potentially indefinite period of time. I honestly don't know what the solution is to challenging the seemingly perpetual entrenchment of many of our elected representatives and the fundraising machine but Paul Begala and James Carville discussed some interesting and sensible ideas about election financing in in their 2005 book, "Take It Back".
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