Watching The Founding Fathers’ Fatal Oversight Playing Itself Out Right In Front of Us
The Republican weakness on the SAVE Act, which a huge majority of Americans support, shows how the Founders’ failure to require term limits is killing America.
Vince Coyner | February 15, 2026
Our Founding Fathers were geniuses. They were far from perfect, but they were generally virtuous men, and they gave us a constitution far superior to anything that had ever been written. The document they wrote was imperfect, as all things that men create are, but it was extraordinary nonetheless—even with the 3/5 Compromise.
One thing they gave us was a system with a separation of powers, both within the federal government and between the federal and state governments. The Bill of Rights, which was basically the quid pro quo agreed to for ratification, extended that distribution of powers by recognizing that some rights belonged to the citizens and were largely beyond the power of government to impinge upon.
In hindsight, however, the Founding Fathers made one fatal error, and we’re seeing it play out right in front of us today. And it’s somewhat curious that they made it...
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, read widely to prepare for writing it. He read Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu. He looked at the constitutions of the various American states. And he studied governments throughout history, such as the Dutch Republic, the Achaean League, and of course, as practically all of the Founders did, the Roman Republic.
And this is what puzzles me. A critical element of the Roman Republic's success was term limits, adopted specifically to prevent an individual from accumulating too much power and leading to a new monarchy. Magistrates, from Quaestors (the entry-level bureaucrat workhorses) to Consuls (the highest ordinary office; supreme executive/military authority), whose terms ran one year each, were generally forbidden from being reelected to the same office for a decade. This ensured that the power remained with the office itself rather than the individual.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/02/watching_the_founding_fathers_fatal_oversight_playing_itself_out_right_in_front_of_us.html
