Rodriguez for Congress campaign
Term limits

[June 18, 2016]  Voters should demand that any political candidate who purports a willingness to challenge the toxicity and work to remedy the dysfunction within the U.S. Congress should state a clear and unequivocal position on the question of term limits. In recent election cycles we have all too readily witnessed the power of the conveyor belt of incumbency, and we can easily grasp the ill effects that this factor has had upon our Democracy. During the 2014 election cycle, 96 percent of incumbents in the U.S. House of Representatives who sought reelection were returned to their posts in spite of the abysmally low esteem with which the institution of the U.S. Congress is regarded according to recent national polls.

Although Congressman Darin LaHood, the Republican incumbent, has on occasion voiced his support for term limits, when pressed for more specifics on the issue he has dialed back his endorsement of the idea and issued a very tepid response to this notion. In May 2015, while a candidate in the Special Election to fill the vacancy in the IL-18th seat, LaHood signed a pledge with the advocacy group U.S. Term Limits to support a three-term limit for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet only weeks later, during a radio interview, LaHood was asked about his views on term limits and he stated that “serving somewhere between six terms and eight terms would be something that would be appropriate.” One might also infer that the Congressman’s obvious penchant for a lifetime career in politics might imply that term limits is nothing more than an elaborate game of “musical chairs” in which one finds vacancies to fill while ever-rising within the political echelon. There is something very shallow in this.

Democratic challenger Junius Rodriguez has stated on multiple occasions that he personally supports the notion of term limits. According to Rodriguez, “If given the honor of representing the residents of the IL-18th congressional district, I will view this as what the Founders intended it to be--a temporary assignment that has been granted to me. I have absolutely no intention of serving more than three terms (six years) in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Junius Rodriguez believes that there is an inherent danger in the power of entrenched incumbency in American politics today, and he does not want to go to Washington to join the club, but rather to challenge the business-as-usual mentality that prevails there.

Junius Rodriguez believes that one of the most important measures of a person’s character is how they handle power. He knows that a person’s willingness to relinquish power voluntarily is one of the most consequential tests of leadership. In crafting our constitutional system to be “a machine that could go of its own,” the Founders understood that the willingness of ordinary citizens to step forward in times of national consequence was indeed the essence of how a Citizen Democracy should function. Supporting the notion of term limits is one of the ways that we can restore a level of accountability to a political system that has become terribly jaded in the eyes of the People.

[Democratic nominee Junius P. Rodriguez for 18th congressional district of Illinois]