Margaret Flowers on Government Reform

No religious oaths for public office, juries, or citizenship

We call for:
• Ending discriminatory federal, state, and local laws against particular religious beliefs, and non-belief.
• The US Constitution states that there shall be no religious test for public office. This requirement should apply to oaths for holding public office at any level, employment at all government levels, oaths for juries and witnesses in courts, and the oath for citizenship.
• Prosecution of hate crimes based on religious affiliation or practice.
• Elimination of displays of religious symbols, monuments, or statements on government buildings, property, web sites, money, or documents.
• Restoration of the Pledge of Allegiance to its pre-1954 version, eliminating the politically motivated addition of "under God."
• Ending religiously based curricula in government-funded public schools.
• Ending the use of religion as a justification to deny children necessary medical care or subject them to physical and emotional abuse.

Signed term limit pledge: 6 years House; 12 years Senate.

Organizational Self-Description: U.S. Term Limits, the nation's oldest and largest term limits advocacy group, announced that 14 new signers of its congressional term limits amendment pledge have been elected to the 114th Congress. The group includes five new senators, eight new House members and one House incumbent who signed the pledge for the first time this cycle. The pledge calls for members to co-sponsor and vote for a constitutional amendment limiting House members to three terms (six years) and Senators to two terms (12 years). The USTL President said, "The American people are fed up with career politicians in Washington and strongly embracing term limits as a remedy. Gallup polling shows that 75% of Americans support term limits."

Opposing legal argument: [ACLU, Nov. 7, 2014]: In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (May 22, 1995), the Court ended the movement to enact term limits for Congress on a state-by-state basis. The Court held that the qualifications for Congress established in the Constitution itself could not be amended by the states without a constitutional amendment, and that the notion of congressional term limits violates the "fundamental principle of our representative democracy 'that the people should chose whom they please to govern them.'"

Opposing political argument: [Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 14, Feb. 18, 1992]: Several considerations may explain political scientists' open hostility to term limitation:

• Political scientists were instrumental in promoting the professionalization of legislators.
• They are cynical about the attentiveness, general knowledge, and judgmental capacity of the average voter.
• They are committed to the conservation of leadership.
• They perceive attacks on professional politicians as a threat to their own self-proclaimed professionalism.
• And political partisanship may encourage them to oppose term limits.