Mike Thompson: “this is a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of Members of Congress. It calls for a limitation of 12 years, 2…”

“this is a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of Members of Congress. It calls for a limitation of 12 years, 2 terms in the U.S. Senate; a limitation of 12 years, 6 terms in the House of Representatives. As I indicated, the last vote on term limitations in this body was in 1947, so it has taken about 49 years to get the second vote on this, not that anybody has been particularly pushing for it. I believe it is the first constitutional amendment for term limits to ever come out of committee. This had a full committee hearing. It passed out of the Judiciary Committee, and now, for the first time, a committee bill is on the floor ready for consideration. I think it is long overdue. In this body, it has been my observation that we pay as close attention as we can to what the American people want. We pay as close attention as we can to what our constituents want. We have offices all across the various States. We go to those offices, we listen, we get tallies on what people are calling in about, what people's concerns are. We go out and we pride ourselves, as elected Members, having town hall meetings, and we say a large part of the purpose of that is to listen, to see what is going on so we can be reflective of the opinions of the people that we represent. We run our campaigns on the same basis. We say, let us be your Representative and we will go up and listen to the people. Let us turn the Congress back to the people.”