Legislative term limits

I don't think I ever really mentioned in detail what I envisioned for federal term limits.

Time to fix that.

Edit 7-26-2015 : since I forgot it then, I'm adding the way to bring the legislative branch back to the representative democracy out Forefathers likely envisioned..
    first off, our forefathers I don't think ever envisioned a time where being an elected official was a lifetime career choice. and a lucrative one at that.

I hold to the belief that, if your a federally elected official, you have up to 3 levels responsibility to the people.

1) at the Representative level, you are primarily beholden to the district that elects you first. then to the state you represent. Then finally, to the country as a whole.
2) at the Senator level, because your elected in a statewide vote, you just merge the elected district and state and national levels
3) at the executive level, due to the national vote of the election, speaks for itself. and has, thanks to the 22nd amendment, strict term limits


The 22nd amendment is actually a good starting point for our discussion about federal legislative term limits. it does need some tweaking based on the different term sizes the upper and lower chamber of Congress work.

I have a couple of variations I'd like to throw out there

1) 6 terms in the House, 3 in the Senate (which given the 1/2 term provision in the 22nd, would give Representatives 12 to 13 years, Senators 18 to 21 years)
2) the same 6 terms for the house, but cut the Senate to 2 terms.

Either way, once you've accomplished one, you can go do the other if possible.. but there are no repeats on either.. once you hit your limits on both, that's it. I have no issue with anyone who manages to get to the term limits offering their services to whomever replaces them for a year in a paid advisory role (to show them the ropes per se).

Another thing I want to tackle is the lifetime perks of being a federally elected official I want to call for the elimination of the congressional/presidential salary for life perk once out of office for ANY federally elected office (which has the potential to save a boatload of money.. also gives elected officials an incentive to plan for their own retirements. Because if you think about it, as it stands now why should they?). I also have no issue with the post service Secret Service details for former presidents.

while we're at it (this is the edit mentioned above), how about we fix the severe representative imbalance currently afflicting our legislative branch. Using the House as the guide, the ratio of citizens to federally elected officials is something like 735k to 1, far and away the largest such ratio in the world. If we, in conjunction with applying my idea above and lower the ratio to something slight more sane. i would prefer something along the lines of most of the rest of the world (under 100k to 1) but that would make Congress simply TOO unwieldy. cutting it to 250k to 1 would only roughly triple the size of the House, and say add a third senator per state for balancing purposes.