The Twenty-Second Amendment fixed the presidency. Congress stayed broken.
Ratified in 1951, two years after Franklin Roosevelt's death, the amendment limits presidents to two elected terms. The Founders had left executive tenure uncapped, trusting competitive elections to prevent entrenchment. Four terms of FDR demonstrated that trust was misplaced. Congress corrected the problem for one branch and stopped there.
That omission has consequences. House incumbents win reelection at rates consistently above 90 percent. Senate reelection rates hover near 85 percent. The result is a professional political class, tenured by default, that the Founders specifically warned against. George Washington voluntarily surrendered power twice, once at the end of the Revolutionary War and again after two terms in office, not because any law required it but because he understood that the republic's health depended on the regular rotation of men in office. His example held for 150 years. The Twenty-Second Amendment then encoded it for the presidency alone and declared the problem solved.
It wasn't.
Term limits for Congress poll above 80 percent with Republican and Democratic voters alike. That number has been stable for decades. The policy is one of the few questions in American politics where the public has reached something close to consensus across party lines. The political class has reached the opposite conclusion: no Congress will propose a constitutional amendment that ends its own members' careers. This isn't a cynical observation. It's common sense.
The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton in 1995. Arkansas had tried to impose term limits on its congressional delegation through a state ballot initiative. The Court struck it down 5-4, holding that the qualifications for congressional service are fixed by the Constitution and can't be supplemented by state law. Justice Kennedy's concurrence was pointed: the people's sovereign power over their federal representatives derives from the national community, not from individual states. Only a constitutional amendment can impose congressional term limits. The states that tried the shortcut were told that the long way is the only way.
Article V provides two paths to amendment: proposal by two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, or proposal by a convention of states called on application of two-thirds of the state legislatures. The first path requires Congress to propose its own constraints, which is roughly analogous to asking a tenured professor to vote on eliminating tenure. The second bypasses Congress entirely. The Convention of States Project has secured active resolutions from more than 20 state legislatures seeking exactly this kind of convention, focused on fiscal restraints, limitations on federal authority, and congressional term limits.
No Article V convention has ever been called. The mechanism exists in the Constitution, has been cited as a credible political threat throughout American history, yet has never reached the 34-state threshold required to convene. The practical obstacle is organizational, not constitutional. Assembling 34 states around a mandate narrow enough to prevent expansion beyond its stated purposes is the challenge the movement hasn't yet solved. Critics invoke the "runaway convention" concern, the fear that a convention once convened might exceed its mandate and propose amendments far beyond term limits or fiscal restraints. Supporters counter that any convention proposal still requires ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures, which is a formidable check on any runaway result.
Both sides have a point. That's not a reason to abandon the mechanism. It's a reason to draft the convention call carefully.
My experience with several industries, including the military, has exposed me to institutions where service comes with defined terms and defined exits. You don't hold a command indefinitely because you've gotten good at it. You rotate, because the institution is larger than any individual's tenure, and its health depends on renewal rather than entrenchment. Congress has inverted that logic entirely. The longer a member serves, the more resources he commands, the more committee assignments he accumulates, and the harder he becomes to dislodge. That's not the design the Founders intended. It's what happens when the design goes unenforced.
Permanent executive power is a structural threat to self-government, and the Twenty-Second Amendment's authors understood that. The same logic applies to Congress, arguably more so: 535 members with career tenure create far more collective institutional inertia than any single president ever could. Incumbency advantages, safe districts, campaign finance structures that reward seniority, and a professional political infrastructure built to protect sitting members have made competitive elections a nominal constraint rather than a real one.
Whether the political will to use the Article V mechanism exists is a separate question from whether the mechanism works. The public has reached its conclusion on term limits. The professional political class has reached the opposite one. That gap is precisely what the convention process was designed to close, constitutionally rather than just rhetorically.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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