The Twenty-Second Amendment fixed the presidency. Congress stayed broken.

Ratified in 1951, two years after Franklin Roosevelt's death, the amendment limits presidents to two elected terms. The Founders had left executive tenure uncapped, trusting competitive elections to prevent entrenchment. Four terms of FDR demonstrated that trust was misplaced. Congress corrected the problem for one branch and stopped there.

That omission has consequences. House incumbents win reelection at rates consistently above 90 percent. Senate reelection rates hover near 85 percent. The result is a professional political class, tenured by default, that the Founders specifically warned against. George Washington voluntarily surrendered power twice, once at the end of the Revolutionary War and again after two terms in office, not because any law required it but because he understood that the republic's health depended on the regular rotation of men in office. His example held for 150 years. The Twenty-Second Amendment then encoded it for the presidency alone and declared the problem solved.

Term limits for Congress poll above 80 percent with Republican and Democratic voters alike. That number has been stable for decades. The policy is one of the few questions in American politics where the public has reached something close to consensus across party lines. The political class has reached the opposite conclusion: no Congress will propose a constitutional amendment that ends its own........

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