There are 660,000 members in each district today. Surely there is more than one good candidate. The best representatives should be come our Senators and Governors. We must guard against the corruption that comes with virtually unlimited power. A couple of terms should be adequate, at least for now until we can plug the holes in the sinking ship.

I have always been somewhat conflicted on term limits, because there are excellent representatives who are forced out with the bad--and frankly, I think it's harder to find and keep a good one than it is a bad one. However, I agree that the good outweights the bad. And particularly for the first election cycle, keeping strict term limits is a good idea.

I would find term limits more desirable if the wording made it clear that a good candidate could run for a differnt office without restriction. Also, it might help if the restriction on being a resident of the state you were running in was made less restrictive. That way, an excellent representative (with great name recognition) could go to another state and run there after resigning their current position. They would not have the advantage of being an encombent, nor would they retain their seniority--so it would still offer many of the advantages of term limits as currently stated, while allowing for the retention of good candidates.

Thanks for the input. We intend to survey all GOOOH members on this very issue towards the end of this year. For now, we feel it is very important that we are NOT looking for candidates who want to make a career out of politics.

The average length of service of the U.S. Representatives in our 111th Congress is 11.0 years or 5.5 terms (http://www.murtha.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=585&Itemid=62)

I recommend rewording the term limit question in the screening exam to allow a GOOOH candidate to support a term limit between four to twelve years.  This will eliminate the making of career representatives in Congress while also encouraging a broader coalition of representatives to join our effort towards implementing term limits.

I believe the four year requirement is unnecessarily restrictive on the GOOOH party and will hinder our efforts towards getting our House back!

You make good points, but given that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the overwhelming consensus in America favors term limits.

Tom Coburn's book Breach of Trust provides perhaps the best explanation of why we need Term Limits. For those who don't recall, Coburn is the Oklahoma Doctor who was elected as part of the Class of '94. He promised to serve only three terms, and kept his promise unlike most of the others.

Term limits are a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, there are representatives who have served their constituents over several decades and continue to do so.  There is nothing stopping any eligible candidate from running against these incumbents and removing them by popular vote.  If the people are satisfied with their sitting representative, they should have the option of returning that candidate as long as it pleases them.  On the other hand there are powerful interests who provide large sums of money to make sure their candidate is readily recognized by a large proportion of the voters.  These interests work hand-in-glove with the established party leadership and the media to make sure that the candidate tells the electors what they want to hear then votes the way the special interests who bankrolled the campaign want them to when the time comes.  In many areas, the same candidates are trotted out year after year and the uninformed electorate is presented with the dilemma of choosing 'the lesser of two evils' (refer to the last presidential election for more on this).  This is not a term limit issue, this is more an issue of an uneducated electoral body.

If every state had term limits the committee leadership argument would disappear.

We have term limits here in Colorado. I think it even includes County elected positions. I don't know all of the details off the top of my head, but I know that when term limits first passed (probably during the Contract with America period) the people of Colordo expected our elected officials in Washington to abide by term limits. I think there was even a pledge they had to take. As it turned out, because term limits never became law at the federal level our elected officials were not getting key committee assignments, etc. so that was the end of that. I know term limits here are still controversial. Some love them, some hate them.

My personal feeling is that it has worked out really well.