February 27th was Term Limits Day, commemorating when the 22nd Amendment, limiting presidents in America to two terms, was ratified 71 years ago. Unfortunately, beltway corruption and powerful incumbents, the very things term limits remove from government, arrayed to push a flawed Supreme Court ruling to ban congressional term limits from the rest of the united states. Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent of this bad ruling of U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton of 1995, and has referenced it since whenever real state’s rights are brushed aside by creating new, non-enumerated federal powers by those who would wield them.
As Thomas correctly outlines the issue in his 1995 dissent, “Nothing in the Constitution deprives the people of each state of the power to prescribe eligibility requirements for the candidates who seek to represent them in Congress. The Constitution is simply silent on this question. And where the Constitution is silent, it raises no bar to action by the states or the people.” Yet the ruling banned all congressional term limits by all states, with the swing of an activist gavel. As this is an election year and we have the most elderly, most entrenched, most tenured federal government in history, it is imperative that all Americans, or at least the 80+ percent that support congressional term limits, make this an issue at every public event held by any candidate for federal office. Do this on Term Limits Day and every other day.
Nick McNulty
Windham