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eftychia at 07:31pm on 2003-04-11
eftychia at 07:31pm on 2003-04-11Something tells me I'm not going to sleep well tonight, either ... after a friend forwarded me this URL with the message, "I've got a bad feeling about this." Somebody with more of a politics-clue care to give me some idea just how concerned I should be about this? As far as I can tell, it was introduced to comittee in January and nothing's happened since. Is it one of those things that gets submitted every few years and never goes anywhere, or is it a creepy sign of impending further creepiness?
JOINT RESOLUTIONObviously, there's the matter of convincing three fourths of the state legislatures to play along as well, which ought to put the brakes on things, but in light of historical parallels between what Bush has done so far and how a certain other famous politician rose to power, I'm feeling a bit jumpy about it. Somebody tell me I don't have to worry.
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.
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That said, I'd be in favor of rewriting the 22nd amendment to prevent only consecutive terms. It's the incumbency bonus that's really worrying. If someone can leave office and then get themselves re-elected 4 or more years later, more power to them.
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Personally, I'd be in favor of rewriting it to prevent consecutive terms myself. However, the only problem with that is the fact that you wind up with that nasty little lame duck session EVERY presidency.
But if we're not allowing more than two consecutive terms now anyway, it's almost every time after all.
HOWEVER if we did make it prevention of consecutive terms, but no eventual term limits, it would prevent each administration from taking too much time out of the presidency in order to campaign for him/herself, and at the same time curtail the number of times an outgoing president does something truly STUPID on the way out of office. If someone thinks that s/he can get elected again, no matter how small the likelihood, then that person is less likely to do something that will piss off the populace. Any politician in a lame duck period knows s/he has NOTHING TO LOSE. And they have in the past done some truly stupid things on the way out, because they have nothing to lose by doing them.
Kind of like a man on death row killing another inmate. After all, what harm is it going to do him? What are they gonna do, kill him? (what are they gonna do, not re-elect him? *smirk*)
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-m
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Faireraven does make an interesting point though.