6 a) Political Office: Service or career?                                                                                               The most frequent reasons I hear in support of unlimited terms are experience, committee status and influence. All of these tend to support the pecking order of the position and ability to support & represent a particular state. I really understand this point of view, but happen to adamantly disagree. I doubt the founding fathers envisioned “career” politicians. Most were either farmers or businessmen with full time careers. They viewed their political positions as a duty to serve their country with very little compensation. For well over half of the history of this country our representatives did a great job of self-imposing term limits. At some point this position morphed into lucrative “career” opportunities.                                                                                                                                                              Source for below in quotes: http://mic.com/articles/61831/what-would-the-founding-fathers-do-about-congressional-term-limits-today                                                                                      “One can continually make the argument that power corrupts, or that by ceaselessly electing the same representatives to Congress, they grow complacent and removed from those who elect them, but what did the Framers and Founding Fathers have to say about term limits? During the 18th century, many of the colonies such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina all had some sort of provision that required office rotation such as flat out term limits, or not being able to serve consecutive terms in their respective legislatures. In fact, the United States’ first governing document, The Articles of Confederation included a provision that stated “no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years…”                                                                                                                                                                       During the ratification debates of the new federal Constitution, although not present during the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison on the principles of office rotation stating: “I dislike, and strongly dislike … the abandonment, in every instance, of the principle of rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the President..                                                                                                                                                       Clearly, the delegates of the Constitutional Convention did not consider congressional term limits a serious enough proposal to be considered in the new Constitution in the early days of the republic since serving in Congress was largely seen as a part time job that came secondary to each representatives respective job in their home state (Congress only met part time throughout the year for much of the early history of the United States). In fact, office turnover in Congress did not become a serious issue until the early years of the 20th century when Professor Mark P. Petraca points out that in 1901, the average term of members of the House of Representatives rose above two terms.”

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