Term limits are unconstitutional. They are a means of voting out of office people that you could not otherwise vote for or against. I voted for term limits in California solely on the basis of getting Willie Brown out of Sacramento. The clowns who replaced him were not any better and Willie moved on to a different elected position.
The more turnover you have in elected positions, the deeper the power of the background bureaucracy retains. It's a trade off.
The founding fathers really did it right. They arranged the electoral college so that a handful of major population centers couldn't monopolize the presidency. They arranged the Senate so that not only would all states be equal, the rules were designed to delay and slow down legislation. They limited the power of the federal government and provided for checks and balances within it to further weaken it.
Indeed gerrymandering is a problem. My own home town of San Luis Obispo, CA has been gerrymandered into alien districts (either Monterrey or Santa Barbara) much of my life, thus mostly depriving us of representation in Congress. I'm not sure there's any way to solve that.
The only way to really solve the problem is to eliminate the bait. The last 21 years (post-Reagan) have been disastrous. Power increasingly has been concentrating in Washington DC. For all the good President Reagan did, he was unable to keep his campaign promise to eliminate the Department of Propaganda^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HEducation established by perhaps the weakest President of the century the preceding term.
A history lesson for any kids out there: President Reagan submitted 8 budgets to Congress. How many of them were (gleefully) declared Dead On Arrival by Democrat congressional leaders? (A: Every one of them).
The only way to reverse the trend is to remove the money and power out of DC and realistically, it just isn't going to happen. President Reagan couldn't do it and he had an overwhelming mandate.
I recall watching a National Geographic special about some tribe in the Amazon, when their “village” became infested with bugs and the soil played out , they simply burned the old one and moved a few clicks into the New Village. After a couple hundred years the old site will ready for recolinization.
No tax dollars were used in the process.
“Term limits are unconstitutional.”
Not really, there’s nothing in the Constitution which prohibits term limits. The Constitution was changed to keep the President to two terms after FDR wasn’t it.
IMO the root of the problem is federal control. If you can keep the power at the local/state level the politicians can be held accountable.