The seditionists who collectively comprise the Deep State fully understand that their destructive policies have awakened a nationwide wave of outrage and opposition; their answer is to channel that backlash into policies that, rather than restoring constitutional governance, only further the Deep State’s goals.
One of the dangerous bait-and-switches with which these sinister forces want to deceive the American people is term limits. As discontent with the government grows, Establishment voices are pushing term limits as the solution to a political class that openly ignores its constitutional duties as well as the will and well-being of the people.
According to the advocates of term limits, the reason today’s politicians are driving the nation further into destructive and unconstitutional big government is because the same individuals have been in power for years — and they remain in power due to the lack of term limits at the federal level.
Per this train of logic, enacting term limits at the federal level would compel the corrupt politicians in Washington, D.C., to step down, allowing for a fresh generation of constitutionalist elected officials to rise up and fix what’s wrong with the government.
The danger behind this idea is that the Establishment is using it to push for an Article V Convention of the States, arguing that this is the only way to amend the Constitution and thereby institute federal term limits. “After all,” they say, “the politicians will never vote to term limit themselves. Bypassing them by means of constitutional convention (Con-Con) is the only way.”
As The New American recently reported, names as big as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are among those who have added their voices to the Con-Con movement.
Writing on X last week, the governor contended that “We will never turn our country around” without term limits.
TNA has written extensively on the dangers of such a convention, which could go beyond whatever ostensible mandate it has going in and instead be used to drastically rewrite the Constitution in line with the Marxist agenda — a likely scenario given that (as conservative advocates of a Con-Con conveniently ignore), such a convention would most likely be stacked with leftists.
After all, when states such as California and New York already send avowed communists to represent them in Congress, why should it be expected that they would suddenly select constitutional conservatives as their delegates to a Convention of States?
Despite the danger posed by such a convention, many conservatives today remain aboard the Con-Con bandwagon because they think it’s the only way (as DeSantis articulated) to root out corruption in Washington, D.C.
Such thinking far overestimates the benefits that term limits, even if enacted through a less risk-laden mechanism, would have for the country. It stems from a misunderstanding of where political power lies in an electoral system.
The truth is that federal term limits would change virtually nothing about the current political situation — for the underlying problem is not with the politicians themselves, but with those who control the politicians.
In most cases, politicians —whether they are in office for two years or 40 years — are not the ones who actually hold power. Rather, they are interchangeable and disposable puppets, actors playing a part on behalf of wealthy oligarchs who fund the politicians — people like George Soros, Tom Steyer, and the Kochs.
In reality, this has been the case nearly always, not just in the United States, but in elective representative systems throughout history.
This could be seen quite clearly in the Republic of Florence during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Their system had very short terms (only a few months) for their elected officials, including for the city state’s chief executive. But despite the stringent term limits, the city was an oligarchy controlled by the Medici family, who always had new puppets to install in government once the old slate termed out. The heads of the Medici house rarely held public office themselves, preferring to rule from behind the scenes.
The same thing goes on in America today. Here, there are two overarching problems that contribute to voters’ election of anti-constitutional elected officials. The first problem is voter ignorance. This can be seen most clearly in liberal areas where the electorate favors far-left Democrats who make unconstitutional demagogic promises. Of course, the electorates’ ignorance here is itself the result of propaganda and social engineering via the schools, media, etc.
The second problem is seen more in red areas. Here, voters desire conservative candidates who will defend the Constitution, but they keep getting RINOs — Republicans In Name Only — who run as conservatives but vote liberally once in office.
It is in such instances that voters are enticed to support term limits, believing that it is merely incumbency that makes politicians unresponsive to the public and hard to unseat. But such a thought is mistaken. The reason these politicians vote contrary to the will of their constituents and remain difficult to vote out in spite of anger from the base is due to the real problem at hand — the power of the donor class. These politicians, though they paid lip service to the conservative base to get elected, were, in fact, groomed by the Establishment and are beholden to them while in office, knowing that so long as they have the fat cats’ financial support, even an angry base is unlikely to be able to whip up enough voter awareness to unseat them.
Conservatives who live under such conditions blame the notion of “incumbent advantage,” believing that incumbents are hard to vote out because their incumbency gives them more name recognition. There is some truth to that, but the effect is ultimately inconsequential.
The actual incumbent advantage is that the Establishment donor class puts its money behind the incumbent it helped elect — that is what makes the incumbent hard to beat, not the mere act of being an incumbent. In fact, the incumbents generally lose when they cross the Establishment and the big donors instead support the challenger.
And all of this happens because of the simple reality that in a large population, a candidate cannot get his name out to the public without a large financial warchest for advertising.
It is apparent, then, that term limits do nothing to change this situation. Sure, term limits would require an Establishment politician to step down after a few years. But the Establishment already would have his successor waiting in the wings. It’s what they do already — the donor class is constantly grooming aspiring office-seekers and at any given time has a pool of potential candidates for any office ready to go.
And one final point worth considering: the Framers of the Constitution did not include term limits. If they, in their collective wisdom, did not consider it important to term-limit elected officials, do we presume to know better?
In conclusion, there are several critical underlying problems that contribute to the poor quality of elected officials in America today. The lack of federal term limits is not one of them, and the hyper-fixation on term limits is nothing more than a distraction by tyrannical forces who want to lead the conservative movement astray.
