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Friday, April 10, 2009
Burt Prelutsky :: Townhall.com Columnist
Coming to Terms With Term Limits
by Burt Prelutsky
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Will the Dems' health care Christmas Present to America be an improvement or detriment to our health care system?


These days, even commentators who disagree with his politics find it necessary to call President Obama “brilliant” with such regularity, you might get the idea that it’s his first name.

It reminds me of the way the MSM kept telling us that Hillary Clinton was the brightest woman in America. The way they trumpeted her intelligence, you’d have thought she’d come up with a cure for Parkinson’s when, in fact, the smartest thing she’d ever done was to marry a serial adulterer.

Before Hillary came along, the same folks kept insisting that Jimmy Carter was smarter than Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein put together. Liberals are constantly sticking some fool’s brain on a pedestal simply because they approve of his or her left-wing agenda. They are so in awe of their political idols that I keep expecting Chris Matthews, Bill Maher or Keith Olbermann, to break the news that, on top of everything else, Barack Obama plays basketball better than Kobe Bryant or LeBron James.

Speaking of the president, it occurred to me that he has single-handedly buried the old maxim about talk being cheap. Every time he opens his yap, it costs the American taxpayer another trillion dollars.

Finally, although I hate to sound too cynical, it strikes me that Obama intends to fix the economy exactly the way the vet fixed my dog, Duke.

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About The Author
W. Burt Prelutsky is an accomplished, well-rounded writer and author of "The Secret of Their Success: Interviews with Legends and Luminaries."
 
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re: WbHeff - A Modest Proposal

I have a lot of sympathy for your suggestion. William F. Buckley famously said he would prefer to be governed by the first 2000 people named in the Cambridge telephone book than by the Harvard faculty. Robert A. Heinlein once wrote a short story based upon a similar premise, where leadership was selected at random, although in that story all the lawyers had been killed off.

The other thing that would greatly facilitate returning governance to its proper place would be to turn Washington D.C. into a vast museum, and set up the seat of government somewhere in the rural heartland, housed in very uncomfortable surplus Quonset huts.

Naturally, if government has no economic perks to dole out, it suddenly becomes far less attractive as a path to power for the megalomaniacs who will always be amongst us. This human defect will never be stamped out, but we can at least take measures to discourage its elevation to positions of influence.

the coming difficulties ..

Those who inhabit Washington D.C. will not voluntarily give up their perks, their power, access to our money, their arrogance. The road to re-establishing a proper political balance in the USA goes through the States.

The only remaining peaceful mechanism is a Constitutional Convention, called by the States. It is patently obvious that there are ample grounds for the States' to assert their primacy under Amendment X of the Constitution. Here is a simple agenda for such a Constitutional Convention:

* repeal Amendments XVI - eliminate income taxes and prevent the imposition of any tax that does not equally burden all citizens.
* repeal Amendment XVII - senators should represent the interests of the States, so that the Senate once again can act as the forum where States inhibit the excesses of the House of Representatives and the Executive.
* impose term limits upon all members of Congress. {I would go further and impose lifetime tenure limits upon all non-military forms of government service, but that is an argument for another day.}

This limited agenda would go a considerable distance toward putting the Federal Government back in its proper place, and re-establish the States as the guardians of the Constitution, as they were intended to be.

For those who fear a Constitutional Convention, I suggest the following. There has only been one such event, so to argue that there are precedents preventing a constraint upon the agenda is tenuous at best. If there is no common ground to support a return to a constitutional republic, what harm is there in using such a failed Constitutional Convention as the basis for an amicable divorce, compared to the disaster of an accelerated decline into tyranny?
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