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Term Limits for Congress

By: Kaitlin McCoy


U.S. Government and Politics
Professor Kurt Shirkey
07/22/2015

In the United States, there are three branches of government, Judicial, Executive, and
Legislative. The congress is the body in the Legislative branch which includes the House of
Representatives and the Senate. Currently, there are no term limits for the House of
Representatives and the Senate. The senate can serve unlimited six-year terms and the House of
Representatives can serve unlimited two-year terms. A term limit amendment was tried in the
past but it never passed, falling short of the required 2/3 majority vote.

Currently, the House of Representatives and the Senate are dominated by the
Republicans. In the House of Representatives, there are 434 total members, once vacant spot.
Out of that 434, 246 of them are Republican and only 188 are Democrats. That means there is
around 13% more Republicans in the House than Democrats. That seems to me like a pretty
unfair advantage. Now, lets take a look at the Senate. There are 100 Senators total, 54
Republicans, 44 Democrats and 2 Independents. As you can see, there are 10% more
Republicans than there are Democrats. I found some interesting facts to look at here regarding
our current Congressional members: http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/cong.aspx.

Now, another thing to look at, what about gender domination in the Congress? For the
House, only 18.9% are currently woman. In the Senate, only 20% are woman. Why is it that men
are dominating women by about 60% in Congress? We have come a long way with gender
equality over the years. However, there is a still a huge deficit and the improvements have been
dragged out for quite some time now. Take a look at this link here to see the percentage of
woman is Congress get higher as the years go on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives. There
are currently only 43 African Americans in the House and only 2 in the Senate. African
Americans only represent 9% of the House and 2% of the Senate.

As you can see, the Congress is not a fair representation of the American people. Rather,
its a very poor one. The point I am trying to make here is that there are obvious issues with the
facts I have provided you and something needs to be changed to end this vicious cycle of
domination by Republicans, Males, and Whites. The way election currently works with the
Senate is there is an election held every two years for a six-year term. There are two Senates for
every State, totaling one hundred. When election rolls around every two years, about 1/3 of the
Senate is up for election. The House holds election every even numbered year and the
representatives serve two-year terms.

There should be a two six-year term limit for the Senate and for members of the House,
six two-year term limits. This way, it is evenly distributed among each section of Congress. This

is actually the term limits that were on the amendment which failed to pass back in the 1990s. It
makes no sense to make term limits for the President but not for the Congress. This gives the
Congress way too much power. We also need to have a fair representation of the U.S. population,
there is almost no diversity in this pool and more needs to be created.

Reelection rates over the years are quite higher than I would like to see. Here are some
graphs I found on: https://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php.

The members of the Congress are essentially incumbent. Why do we even reelect every
two years if the same people just keep getting elected? There needs to be a limit to get more
people cycled through the Congress to get various views and opinions a chance to make laws. I
once heard this quote by Henry Ford, If you do what you always have, youll get what youve
always gotten. We need to change with the time, people have more acceptance for diversity now
more than ever and I would like to see more diversity within the U.S. government. I mean
seriously, there has never even been a female President. Barrack Obama is our first African
American president elected in 2008. There is no need for our government to have such a lengthy
process in creating diversity within our government.

In the Declaration of Independence, it says, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that


all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. All I can see here is history
repeating itself. When African Americans slaves were finally freed, it was almost impossible for
them to live a normal life after that or at least not a life even close to what whites had. Blacks
still worked for the Whites but for a low wage. I know that example may seem a little extreme.
However, it does have correlation to our current issues. Women, Blacks and Democrats are still
allows to run for Congress of course, there chances of actually winning are just significantly
lower than if they were Male, White and Republican.

Works Cited
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/cong.aspx
https://www.boundless.com/political-science/textbooks/boundless-political-sciencetextbook/congress-11/congressional-elections-81/congressional-terms-and-term-limits-447-1558/
http://pols1100text.weebly.com/

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