Answer:
In today’s political climate, we can say that people have mixed opinions about this topic. Right now, in the Senate 63% of Senate officials are over 65 years old, bringing the total number of Senate officials over 65 to 21 members (Quorum 2019). The question is raised now, are these members of our government representing us? According to Quorum Analytics, in 2019 the oldest member of the House is Representative Conyers (Democrat), he is 87 years old and represent Michigan. The average age of Michigan citizens in 2019 is 35, that is over half of the age of Rep. Conyers. This is quite an age difference and some of the other members of the house are just a couple of years off of Rep. Conyers. I believe and so many others around the US believe that the new Congress does not represent us as a country. They are too stuck in the past political agenda to see that our country is moving at an exponential rate, growing with the ever so growing economy, the changing way our country works and thinks, and just seems to have trouble keeping up with the modern era of voters that are in this country right. I believe that all members of the House should have up to 3 terms and are limited to those 3 terms which results in 2 years per term. Senate should have up to 2 terms in their tenure in the government, which results into 12 years total in those 2 terms (6 years per term). This will not only be beneficial for the government and the people of the United States also. This will help keep government officials more inclined with their voters and bringing legislation to the forefront of today’s issues instead of reverting back to legislation that would have only worked many years ago, also it will keep our government young and fresh.
Well, to be perfectly fair we have to look all the way back to the time where the constitution was constructed and approved in 1887, on a hot summer day the constitution was written by the members of the Senate. Of course, those members did not want to add a term limit and it was not spoken of because they thought they knew what was best for the country at the time. How could anyone blame them for the pathway they laid out for us anyways? We are doing a really great job with the modern constitution with the changes that had to me made in order for the country to function up to date. Almost like a computer update, sometimes if the old update is doing fine, we are going to keep it on that version until something monumentally goes wrong, and some of us like new updates and changes right away. Either way though, the citizens of the United States have been brought up and actually brought into law in 1639 with the Fundamental Orders of 1639. The colony’s governor was prohibited from serving consecutive terms of only one year, and stating that “no person be chosen governor above once in two years” After independence, Pennsylvania’s Constitution of 1776 limited members of the state’s General Assembly from serving more than “four years in seven”. At the federal level, the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781, set term limits for delegates to the Continental Congress – the equivalent of the modern Congress – mandating that “no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years”. Even in a short time period of 1990-1995 23 states had term limits but in the Supreme Court case of U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton. It ruled out the 23 states having any sort of constitutional power to enact term limits on their states.
The Founding Father considered and closed the idea of term limits for Congress. In Federalist Papers No. 53, James Madison, Father of the Constitution, explained why the Constitutional Convention of 1787 rejected term limits.
“A few of the members of Congress will possess superior talents; will by frequent re-elections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members of Congress, and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt they be to fall into the snares that may be laid before them”, wrote Madison (Longley, 2019).