End the Era of Career Politicians
Congress was never meant to be a lifetime career. The Founders pictured citizen legislators—people who serve for a time and then go home to live under the laws they passed. What we have instead is a permanent political class that treats a seat as a personal possession, while House incumbents win re-election above 90% almost every cycle.
Roughly three out of four Americans, across both parties, want term limits. The only people who don't are the ones who benefit from the current system. We've written the amendment that would finally do it—and this page gives you everything you need to push it forward. This is the third of the constitutional amendments we've drafted, and we're publishing each one on its own so you can take up whichever matters most to you.
A lifetime cap on congressional service, written to be both real and realistic.
Voters already tried the easy way. Twenty-three states passed their own congressional term limits by ballot initiative—and in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995), the Supreme Court struck them all down, ruling that neither states nor Congress can add qualifications to federal office by ordinary law. The only qualifications are the ones in the Constitution itself. The lesson was blunt: the only way to term-limit Congress is to amend the Constitution. So that's what we drafted.
We try to be straight about the downsides of everything we propose. The real ones here:
This is a discussion draft prepared for review by legislative counsel and for presentation to Members of Congress—proposed constitutional text, not final legislative language. The wording will keep tightening as it moves forward.
Read the full text, share it, and—most importantly—send it to your Representative. All three are formatted Word documents you can print or attach to an email.
An amendment has to be proposed by Congress before any state can ratify it, so the people to contact are your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. This is the one reform members are most reluctant to give themselves—which is exactly why constituent pressure matters so much. Not sure who they are?
A short, specific message from a constituent carries real weight—far more than a mass-produced form letter. Personal calls to a district office count even more.
Here's a letter you can use as a starting point. Make it your own—add a sentence about why a permanent political class bothers you. Fill in the bracketed pieces, then paste it into your Representative's contact form or print and mail it.
Consider attaching the one-page summary or the full text (above) so your Representative's office has the actual language in hand.
Term limits are one of the rare ideas that unites Americans across every line—consistently backed by around three of four voters, in poll after poll, for decades. The opposition has never really been the public. It's the small group who benefit from the status quo, being asked to vote for limits on themselves.