In a representative republic, the people should be free to vote for whomever they want to represent them, for as many terms as they want that representation. "Term limits" is like the old "stop me before I kill again" argument; keep the right to vote for someone, but only let me do it once?
That said, the solution in the Senate is not term limits, it is to eliminate the elections altogether and let the state legislatures decide whom to send to the Senate. The states should be free to choose anybody they want; the term is limited by how long the legislature feels the Senator is being effective in representing their state's interests. The people can then decide how well their state representatives are selecting their Senators.
Presidential term limits are a post-17th amendment phenomenon. I wonder why we never had a 3rd term president until Roosevelt? Was it because the Senate no longer represented the states, and the states couldn't influence the federal government like they did just 20 years earlier? Repeal the 17th amendment instead of placing term limits on Senators.
House Representatives are too numerous and their districts are too small to limit whom the locals wish to send to Congress. However, with the rise of the influence of national parties due to the need to raise campaign cash for 33 Senate elections every two years, there is a party trickle-down of money to the House by party members in the Senate. If you eliminate Senate elections, you dry up a major source of campaign funds that would naturally flow to House races, too.
In the House, I'd look at two areas: 1) reforming district reapportionment and gerrymandering, and 2) increasing the number of districts from 435 to some higher number.
For gerrymandering, I understand the need to keep natural communities together (where straight grid-mapping may not work), so perhaps a reapportionment that keeps geographic ZIP codes together might work. Try grid-mapping whole ZIP codes instead of snaking "ethnic" zones into districts.
For House size, the current limit of 435 Representatives was set by the The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 based on the census of 1910 when the population was 92,228,496. The result of the 2010 census was 308,745,538, a 235% increase in the last 100 years. Maybe it's time to increase the size of the House? This would rebalance the party split in Congress, as well as increase the Electoral College to influence presidential elections.
In summary, the better alternatives to "term limits" are:
1. Repeal the 17th amendment.
2. Fix the gerrymandering problem in the House.
3. Increase the size of the House to match current population.
Maybe with a larger and more fairly redistricted House, we won't see controversial splits between the Electoral College result and the so-called "popular vote" that the left uses to delegitimize results it doesn't like?
Do these things and a natural term limit will be restored across all of the federal government.
-PJ
......”the solution in the Senate is not term limits, it is to eliminate the elections altogether and let the state legislatures decide whom to send to the Senate”.....
I wouldn’t agree to that.