I wrote to LONLANG [Anacronym for: Laws Of Nature And Nature's God] to ask them if the state's legislaures had termlimits for the Senators the elected...
I agree that the various state legislatures should select, then elect the Senators rather than by popular vote of the citizens.
My question is: I cannot find in my reading how long those Senators are to serve? I'm also an advocate of 'term limits' so that Senators such a Robert Byrd, Joe Biden or Ted Kennedy spend their entire life entrenched in Washington in the U.S. Senate like mini-Presidents or life-long Justices. Presidents seem to come and go, but Senators are forever."
They wrote me back and it was quite an education for me:
LONLANG: "Both the original U.S. Constitution (Art. I, Sect. 3, Cl. 1) and the 17th Amendment fix the term of senators at six years. Neither imposes any limit on the number of terms a person may serve.
Yes, we have drifted a long way from what the founders expected - public officials serving part-time or with minimal pay, with a robust democratic process ensuring that office holders would be rotated out of office frequently and regularly. They never envisioned that the system they set up would enable people to serve in the same office for 40 years and to be compensated handsomely ($169,300 in 2008). And this doesn't even come close to approximating the value of free postage privileges, expense accounts, travel budgets, etc. which virtually guarantee that any senator will become rich.
Term limits become necessary simply because the people aren't doing their job. It is the job of the people to rotate out their elected officials frequently, and they simply aren't doing it. I have even come to believe that lifetime appointments for federal judges is a mistake. I understand why it was set up that way - to keep judges (and the judicial process) protected from political influences. But the same thing would be accomplished if the appointment process remained the same, but judicial terms were limited to 10 years.
What we have birthed in our country is a system of nobility - anyone can become part of that nobility, theoretically, but once someone gets in, you can never get them out. And then they all get pensions at taxpayer expense when they retire. Go figure! Public service was supposed to be a sacrifice, not a means of enrichment.