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They shoot lame ducks, don't they?

The 22nd Amendment of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1951 after the death of three-term president Franklin Roosevelt, forbids a person from holding the office of president for more than two terms in a row. It weakens not only the office of the president, but it also takes away from the power of the voter. The 22nd Amendment should be repealed.

Limitation of presidential terms falls victim to the same arguments that any other term limitations do. First, what if the person in office is doing an excellent job? The second objection, which is even more serious, is that term limits keep people from exercising their voting power.

Close your eyes with me and try to imagine that sometime between now and Nov. 2 the best presidential candidate this nation has ever seen jumps into the big race. We elect the candidate. The new president gives us everything we need, everything we want and figures out where America fits in the global economy and how it should behave as the only global superpower.

The story can take one of two different paths now, but they meet at the same end. The president gets into the second term and goes lame duck, accomplishing nothing, or gets into the second term, still does an outstanding job, but cannot run for re-election. Either way, at the end of two terms, we're stuck with a soon-to-be-one-term, do-nothing vice president at the helm. We had a winner, why didn't we stick with him or her? The 22nd Amendment wouldn't let us.

Returning to reality, let's say we hate our president. How do we get rid of him or her? We vote the president out of office. If we can figure out that we don't like someone and vote the person out of office after one term, why can't we do it after two or three or four?

Do we, as voters, become so stupid after the second term that we can't decide for ourselves whether or not we want the person in office to remain? We the voters, not an arbitrary time limit, should be the last check on elected officials. Also, the Constitution protects the people from the excesses of government by putting power into the hands of the people. Term limits strip away this power by taking away the vote. Again, it is simply the case that the final political arbiter should be the people who vote.

Similar to the objection that presidential term limits would force out that president who does his or her duty well is the objection that the lame duck second term prevents the person from doing so. If there is no way a president will be back after a term, then the other branches of government have no reason to work with him or her in passing legislation. When dealing with the judiciary, this is not so much a problem. It becomes, however, a huge problem when dealing with Congress.

Congress was created by the founders to be the most powerful branch of government, and so it is. Especially with the power to override a veto, if Congress is dead set against working with the president there is precious little the president can to do to convince it otherwise. Remember Clinton's universal health care plan? Evidence the government shut downs over the budget in 1997.

Clinton got few if any legislative concessions in 1999. Clinton now is a classic lame duck. Politically, he's impotent. Before we go about repealing the 16th Amendment, which allows income taxes, or bloating the Constitution with balanced budget and anti-abortion amendments, there is an amendment of much more concern to us: the 22nd. This amendment ought to be repealed because it weakens the political process on the both the voters' and politicians' end of the game. Repeal the 22nd Amendment. Shoot the lame duck.