What are term limits? Term limits in the basic form are things like the amount of years that a public official will be in office. Term limits have been around since the time of ancient Greece. In Athens no man could serve on the council for consecutive terms of a single year. In Rome certain magistrates could not opt for re-election until a certain number of years had passed.
There are two separate kinds of terms: consecutive or lifetime. These two categories are pretty much what they sound like.
Consecutive term limits are limits that are set on the consecutive number of terms that can be served. Some public officials may hold office for two consecutive terms and then take a term period off and then are eligible for re-election for that position and two more consecutive terms.
Lifetime term limits are limits that say there are only a certain amount of terms that an official can hold for a specific position. Example: a person elected to the presidency of the United States can serve that term and only one more term, not matter when he is re-elected, for his or her lifetime.
At one point in American there were term limits imposed on the members of Congress. Under the advice of Thomas Jefferson the fifth article in the Articles of Confederation stated “no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years.” In 1989 when the congress convened in Philadelphia to ratify the Constitution, they left out the term limits from the Articles of Confederation.
Founding Fathers such as Washington, Mason, Franklin, and Jefferson favored terms limits because they feared that re-election of public officials for an unknown amount of time would lead to a similar scenario of rule of that of the British Parliament.
Washington setting his own traditional term limits for the presidency was to show that this nation would not have the same person in power for an unlimited amount of time.
But, as we think of them now, term limits are restrictions on the number of terms or number of consecutive terms that a public official can hold.
Here's another source that examines historical dimensions of U.S. politics. It's from the National Public Radio show "The Diane Rehm Show," and it's the page for the show's special series entitled "The Constitution Today." The series doesn't talk specifically about term limits, but I think these questions such as "How should we interpret the Constitution for our own purposes? How was it intended to be used and interpreted?" are the larger types of questions that you're asking in your blog and other writing projects this semester: http://thedianerehmshow.org/topic/the-constitution-today
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