Why a Single Term in Office is the Cure for a Corrupt Congress

Let’s be blunt: the American political system is broken. It’s not broken because of one party or the other, but because of a design flaw so fundamental it corrupts everything it touches. The engine of our government doesn’t run on policy, principle, or the public good; it runs on re-election. Every decision, every vote, every “crisis du jour” is filtered through the single, all-consuming question: “How will this play back in the district?”

In his razor-sharp essay, “Reflections on Term Limits,” the economist Thomas Sowell doesn’t just identify this cancer—he proposes a radical, elegant, and utterly necessary surgery: a single, non-renewable term for elected officials.

Our core argument is devastatingly simple. We’ve all become numb to: our leaders have no time to actually lead. They are perpetual campaigners, full-time fundraisers, and part-time legislators. Their main occupation isn’t governing; it’s job preservation. This isn’t a partisan jab; it’s a structural reality. The staffers, the aides, the appointees—all theoretically paid by the taxpayers—are, in practice, devoted to the single goal of keeping their boss in power. The national interest is, at best, a secondary concern.

Most term-limit advocates talk about capping service at two or three terms. Sowell rightly calls this a pathetic half-measure. If you give a House member three two-year terms, they will spend four of those six years campaigning. You haven’t solved the problem; you’ve just institutionalized it. His solution? One term. One six-year term for Representatives, one non-renewable presidential term. Suddenly, the entire calculus changes. The conflict of interest vanishes. The endless chase for cash and favor from deep-pocketed special interests loses its purpose. For the first time in their political lives, our representatives could actually do the job we hired them to do: govern.

And what about the inevitable objection? “But we’ll lose all their valuable expertise!” Please. What exactly is this “expertise” that our career politicians cultivate? It’s not expertise in energy policy or agricultural science. It’s expertise in the dark arts of political survival: “packaging, log-rolling, creative accounting and other forms of deception.” It’s the skill of taking a terrible piece of legislation, giving it a friendly name, and buying off enough colleagues with pork-barrel projects to get it passed. This isn’t expertise we should cherish; it’s a skill set we should obliterate.

The best people, the true experts in fields that actually matter—surgery, engineering, entrepreneurship—are not in Washington. Why would they be? They’d have to take a massive pay cut, uproot their families, and subject themselves to the grotesque spectacle of modern campaigning. The only people incentivized to make that sacrifice are either the pathologically power-hungry or the ideologically possessed. As Sowell dryly notes, “Anyone with such a craving for power is the last person to trust with power.” This leads to his most brilliant and counterintuitive proposal: pay them a fortune. A million dollars a year. But with a catch: no perks, no pension, no promise of a future lobbying gig. Make the salary so astronomically high that a leading CEO or a world-class neurosurgeon could afford to take a six-year sabbatical to serve their country without crippling their family’s future. And then, when their term is up, they go home. They return to their real careers. They are citizens who served, not professional politicians who learned how to game the system for decades.

The beauty of this plan is its terrifying simplicity. It aligns incentives with the public good. A one-term legislator, freed from the shackles of fundraising, is a legislator who can make hard choices based on evidence, not on polling data. They can actually read the bills. They can reflect. They can, as the title suggests, use the reflecting pool for its intended purpose.

This essay is more than a commentary; it’s a blueprint for a revolution. It argues that we don’t have a people problem in Washington; we have a systems problem. The system selects for the wrong kind of people and then forces them to behave in the worst possible ways. A single, well-paid term would flush the entire corrupt ecosystem—the lobbyists, the career staffers, the perpetual campaign—down the drain. It’s a bold, clean, and profoundly American idea: that governance should be a temporary service, not a lifetime career. It’s time we started listening.