Accountable Georgia is an initiative for bringing term limits to state legislators in Georgia.

Our nation’s first leaders recognized a few things about how our country needed to work. First: for there to be freedom, government had to be controlled. Second: people of that time recognized the potential for an elected position to become a life-time career. Many historians attribute this idea to the reason why our first elected officials limited themselves as a convention both in Congress and in the Presidency.

These concepts have largely been lost by our generation. While some states have done well for themselves by limiting terms in their state constitution or by statute, 35 states still don’t limit terms for legislators.

Political scientists have noted that since our first 100 years, the average time a person spends in an elected office is continuing to grow. They attribute this to declining competitiveness, the advantages of the incumbency, the rise of political careerism, and the decline in the once popular idea that “Ideas are, in truth, forces”. While it was once popular for politicians to limit themselves by withdrawing, this concept is all but gone.

Historians, and many early politicians seemed to have been right about the consequences of leaving out term limits in federal government. They suggested that these positions would eventually become occupied for longer periods without term limits, and today we see reelection rates as high as 98% in the House and Senate.