First of all, from a philosophical viewpoint, what are Term Limits? They're a limit on the people that are being represented. "But wait," you say, "isn't it a limit on the candidate?" Currently, the people have the right to vote out the candidate every two years, no restrictions. If you put term limits in, you've limited the right of the people to choose who they want to represent them. What we're really saying with Term Limits is that we don't like who the people have chosen, or we think the people are too stupid to figure it out, and therefore we need to limit the damage the people can cause to themselves by kicking the representatives out for them.
That doesn't sound like representative republican democracy. It sounds like people trying to escape the accountability, that democracy demands, of the people for whom they elect (which I argue is one of the defining reasons for any democratic system). This is not "Conservative" in my view. Conservatives don't believe we need Government to protect ourselves from our own stupidity. We only really need to protect ourselves from the stupidity of Government. We'll deal with our own stupidity on our own, and with whoever we can convince to help us!
Second of all, we have right now people like John McCain, who have been in politics forever, who can't even get the point of entry of the 9/11 terrorists correct. And these people are supposed to have experience. Fine you say, let's kick them out, since experience means nothing. But who will these new senators and congressmen rely on for the information to make their way through congress? Will they not have Career, Life Long, Washington Insider staffers to grease the gears? If so, we are now not just stuck with an incompetent life-long politician, who we can at least vote out of office, we are now stuck with scores of staffers who we can't vote out, and who will end up running our government.
I know, they probably Are running it right now. But I guess that's my point. Term limits will not change that fact, and may make it more of a fact. And, they will limit our own choice. There really is no solution to the "Staffer" problem. We can only vote for and hold accountable politicians who are going to rely on good people, people that we can trust to serve the interest of those they represent. Anything else would be unfairly limiting the representatives, telling them who they can and can't get help from (say, with term limits for staffers).
Of course, one change we might make is to get rid of the congressionally provided money they are allowed to hire staffers, but the unintended consequences are still there. The richest representatives would drown the others in staffers hired from their own pockets (do they do this now? Not sure, but probably), and overwhelm the congress with process and procedure.
No, the only real recourse is to reduce the power of the National Government (per Mark Steyn, "'federal' doesn't seem the quite the word anymore") to limit the damage career politicians can have. And learn from our mistakes and vote in citizen legislators who won't be run over by career staffers. To that end, I think it was mistake (and a massive power grab) for us to limit the size of congress. As we grow ever larger, the portion of repesentation grows ever larger with it, till a citizen legislator just doesn't feel right in such an August Esteemed Body. If they were still held to 1:30,000, we might actually know who our representative was without them having to have a major scandal to get on the news.
