Thanks for a carefully thought out response...... My take, howerver is much much different.
First Term limits- It is no secret that the Republic has suffered from career politicians for for up 40 years line their pockets with graft, influence money, and entrenched entitlement. 100's of years ago, we had politicians who though there for their own benefit, at least had the nation's best interest at hand. Now that is not the case. know it would take a constitutional amendment to implement, but there has to be a first step some where.
But this isn't even a first step. It's just blatant pandering that Gaetz already knows with 100% certainty will fail.
A constitutional amendment requires a
two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We have a razor-thin (at best) margin in the House, the Democrats control the Senate, and we don't have a Republican President with the bully pulpit to apply pressure. It has absolutely zero chance of passing even the House with the required margin. And yet, THAT is the issue that Gaetz apparently has chosen as his red line.
How much of a non-substantive, performative clownshow is that? If he was going to the mat over something like raising the debt ceiling, or more money for the border, or at least
something that had even a small chance of success, that would be different. But for the sake of getting purely symbolic votes on issues he knows will never even make it out of the House,
he's handing Democrats the 2024 theme that Republicans are not even capable of governing themselves, much less the country.
I'd love to see Congress pass a Balanced Budget Amendment (even though it would never make it through the states), but trying it when you actually have a majority in the House and Senate makes a hell of a lot more sense. But it is simply ridiculous to hand the Democrats a ready-made example of Republican incompetence for the sake of purely performative votes you know ahead of time that you are going to lose.
What I'd like to see even more than a Balanced Budget Amendment in Congress is moving entitlement programs to the state level. Because states
do have balanced budget requirements, so you'd get the impact of a Balanced Budget Amendment without having to meet the impossible standard of 38 states ratifying it.