Watching The Founding Fathers' Fatal Oversight Playing Itself Out Right In Front of Us

Our Founding Fathers were geniuses.  They were far from perfect, but they were generally virtuous men, and they gifted us with a constitution far superior to anything that had ever been written.  The document they wrote was imperfect, as all things that men create are, but it was extraordinary nonetheless – even with the 3/5 Compromise. 

They gave us a system with a separation of powers, both within the federal government and between the federal and state governments. The Bill of Rights, which was basically the quid pro quo agreed to for ratification, extended that distribution of powers by recognizing that some rights belonged to the citizens and were largely beyond the power of government to impeach upon.

In hindsight however, the Founding Fathers made one fatal error, and we’re seeing it play out right in front of us today.  And it’s somewhat curious that they made it…

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, read widely in preparation for writing it.  He read the writings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu.  He looked at the Constitutions of the various American states.  And he studied governments throughout history such as the Dutch Republic, the Achaean League and of course, as practically all of the Founders did, the Roman Republic. 

And this is what puzzles me.  A critical element of the success of the Roman Republic was term limits, which were adopted for the specific purpose of preventing an individual from accumulating too much power and leading to a new monarchy.  Magistrates, from Quaestors (the entry level bureaucrat workhorses) to Consuls (highest ordinary office; supreme executive/military authority) whose terms ran 1 year each, were generally forbidden from being reelected to the same office for a decade. This ensured that the power remained with the office itself rather than the individual.

With very few exceptions – largely dictatorships, an office rarely called upon and usually for military emergencies – this system of checks allowed the Roman Republic to survive for half a millennium (509 – 27 BC).  What’s more, it was when these limits started to be ignored, first with the Gracchi Brothers and then Marius & Sulla, that the precipitous collapse of the Republic began.  Of course the Gracchi Brothers in particular were responding to a Senate that was intransigent about sharing power – and wealth – with the rest of Italy. (The Senate was largely hereditary and made up of the oldest families and richest men in Rome.)

It’s curious, knowing that Madison and the Founding Fathers were well aware of this history, that they didn’t feel the need to include term limits in our Constitution, particularly as they had included them in the Articles of Confederation.

There are of course reasons for that. Our Founding Fathers never imagined Congress would be a full-time endeavor.  It was a part time job, usually meeting maybe 6 months a year as travel was slow and most congressmen had farms or law practices or businesses that needed to be attended to back home. What’s more, initially there was not a great deal for the federal government to do.  Indeed, state governments, particularly Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York were far more compelling destinations for powerful men than Washington. Demonstrating this, John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court stepped down to become Governor of New York, and when later President Adams reappointed him and the Senate confirmed him, he declined, citing the court’s lack of "the energy, weight and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national government."

At the end of the day, these combined to suggest to a majority of the delegates that term limits would be unnecessary and overly restrictive.

Sadly, that oversight is today starting to hemorrhage and the Republic’s future is at stake. 

From Georgia to Arizona to Minnesota, Americans are watching in real time as revelations about the coup d'état in 2020 finally see the light of day. Suddenly we’re seeing massive amounts of proof that that thing that Democrats warned about for years before the 2020 election, then swore was impossible after it, happened regularly.  Across the country and always in one direction.

Americans see this. And want to fix it, or at least 85% of the population does.  But they can’t. 

Why?  Because we have a handful of GOP senators who simply don’t care and there is little Americans can do about it.

But we have elections you might say. Sure, but they had elections in Soviet Russia too, and their incumbents won only slightly more often than ours. Soviets, with only one name on the ballot, invariably won reelection with averages of 99% of the vote.  “But this is America and we have real competition and freedom of choice” you say.  And what is the average reelection rate for members of Congress?  Well, in 2024 it was… 97% for the House, up slightly from the 94% over the previous 3 decades and 87% in the Senate, down from the 100% in 2022 but exactly what its average was over the previous 35 years.   

As it relates to the problem at hand, the House has recently passed a revised SAVE Act which mandates Voter ID for voting and citizenship proof to register. One would think with 53 seats in the Senate the GOP should be able to pass the act and get it to President Trump’s desk in a New York minute.  But no. Why, because at least 3 senators with a combined tenure of 94 years have decided that they don’t care about honest elections, regardless of what the American people want.  Indeed, 85% of Americans support Voter ID. That level of support is extraordinary. You couldn’t get 85% of Americans to agree on the color of the sun, but they agree on Voter ID. 

But somehow, Susan Collins – 29 years in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski – 24 years, and Mitch McConnel – 41 years (and a revolving cast of a few other vacillating GOP Senators have decided that they know better than the American people.  They don’t care.

These three GOP Senators and a few vacillating others, along with every treacherous Democrat senator – other than maybe John Fetterman, are giving the American people the middle finger.  And they all can do so because they have a close to zero chance of ever facing consequences over their decisions.

And that’s where the problem is. Our Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution to control the nature of man. But they miscalculated. They thought the federal government would remain relatively weak compared to the states and the people. Today it’s anything but. Indeed, Washington has become the most powerful city in the world, controlling most of our lives and literally spending more money than the GDP of every country on Earth besides the US and China.  And because of that, serving in Congress today is the opposite of the part time civic duty the Founders had envisioned. It’s a vehicle for unprecedented power and the riches that brings.

The reality is, Washington has become a cesspool of corruption and the fact that half of Congress feel comfortable stonewalling an issue more popular than baseball and apple pie demonstrates that reality.   

The old saying goes “Power corrupts & absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” 90-98% reelection rates are about as close to absolute power as you can get in a theoretically “democratic” form of government. 

If America has any hope of saving itself on the eve of its 250^th anniversary, this needs to be fixed, and there’s only one way to do it: Term limits.

An 18th Century Scottish Historian Foretells 21st Century America

Our Constitution, perhaps the greatest document in human history behind the Bible, is not quite perfect. In 2025 we can see things that might have been added. Number one is probably term limits.  Another would be a prohibition on deficit spending outside of war.  And maybe they could have added something about judges being responsible for the crimes the criminals they release into society commit…

No doubt there are countless things we could sit here 250 years later and think of that the Founding Fathers could have added but didn’t because they couldn’t see into the future. One thing they could see clearly was that the nature of man is to accumulate power, use that power to take from others and that the most effective way of doing both is by harnessing the power of government. 

Alas, it wasn’t possible to put frameworks in place to control all of the base instincts of men as they are simply unending and evolve constantly. The Founders could not envision our world.  They could write about freedom of speech and the press, but they couldn’t have known about radio or mobile phones or the dark web or Bitcoin or shadowbanning. 

Nonetheless one of the greatest attributes of their Constitution was its staggered terms. The House, the place from which spending originates, is the closest to the people and is elected every two years. The President, who executes the laws, has a term of four years.  Then the Senate, originally the representatives of the state legislatures, serve staggered six-year terms.

The goal of these staggered terms was to tamp the passions of men such that if a majority wanted something they couldn’t easily command it and it would take years for them to take control over the government. The Founders understood that tempers run hot but cooler heads often prevail with time and therefore they wrote a document with built in cooling off periods.

What the Founding Fathers never envisioned however was a permanent government, in either the elected officials or the bureaucracy.  Sadly, today we have both. That wouldn’t be a significant problem if government was as small as it was initially.  Indeed, for America’s first 50 years we had a Department of State, Treasury, War, Attorney General and Postmaster General.  That was it.  Interior and Agriculture came in the middle of the 19^th century when the country was adding states and territories rapidly and farming was becoming a major point of conflict between cattle herders, sheep herders, farmers and miners, not to mention Indians.  Nothing more until the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 – the two split in 1913.

The point is, for most of the first half of America’s history the federal government was essentially an afterthought in the minds of most Americans.  For the Founding Fathers government was part time.  Today it’s anything but. To put this in perspective, there have been almost 2,000 people who have served as a US Senator, and of the 25 who served the longest, all but one started his career in the 20^th century – 15 of them after 1960 – and two are still there!  Similarly, over in the House, where 12,000 people have served as Representatives, of the 33 longest serving, all but one began their service in the 20^th century and four are current members.  The Founding Fathers didn’t see a need for term limits because for them Congress was a service to the country, not a job, and certainly not a permanent career.

Today the federal government is anything but an afterthought in the lives of Americans. Not only does it seek to control almost every aspect of our lives, but it spends like a drunken sailor on liberty weekend.  Not surprisingly, most of the regulations that stifle productivity and innovation and the departments from which most spending emerges are those created in the last century. Seventy five percent of the federal government spending is on things that simply exist at the federal level for our first 150 years.  From healthcare spending to food stamps to Social Security to education, the limited government our Founding Fathers left us with has metastasized into a borg that grows year after year, regardless of who’s in control. 

This does not end well, particularly as the United States is $37 trillion in debt, with twice that in unfunded obligations.  The words of Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler explains why:  “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

On our present course, that is America’s fate. Sadly we have few leaders willing to tell Americans the truth about that reality.  While we have men like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, Americans writ large don’t seem to be interested in following them. 

There are solutions however.  The FairTax would be a giant step in the right direction as it would remove from politician’s hands the ability to manipulate the tax code to give donors goodies. We could sunset regulations.  As an example, every law on the books would sunset after 10 years unless it was renewed by Congress, and would face sunset every 10 years unless it was passed by 60% of each house. Then there’s zero based budgeting, where every department must justify its entire budget from scratch every two years.  At the same time, welfare and other wealth redistribution programs that were never part of the Constitution in the first place must be eliminated, perhaps phased out over a four year period.  And of course, not to be forgotten… term limits.

Implementing these steps would rein in government spending and regulation, but more importantly they would simultaneously unleash an economic juggernaut unlike anything the world has ever seen. 

But as Tytler suggested, that’s not how things usually work. In 1776 a group of extraordinary men risked their lives and livelihoods to give free men an opportunity to build a new nation based on individual liberty and limited government. But before they could do that they needed to inspire the colonies’ citizens, two thirds of whom either wanted to remain British or were undecided.  Against all odds they not only inspired a nation but led it to victory against the world’s most powerful empire. 

But then they did something even more amazing.  Building on the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that rights come from God, they wrote the world’s first constitution based on those individual rights and framed a limited government to allow men to exercise them. 

Today America needs a new group of would-be heroes, men willing to target the entrenched barnacles that have grown up around our Constitution and the leeches that feed off both. It will take wordsmiths like Payne and Jefferson, coalition builders like Madison and Marshall and a leader like Washington to have any chance at success. Let’s hope they emerge before Tytler’s warning comes true.