It is no secret the American government has issues from the top down. Congress is in gridlock 90 percent of the time, state governors frequently let their constituents down and a few powerful individuals have enough influence to catch some local governments in a stranglehold.
It would be foolish of me to pinpoint one factor as the cause of it all, but I can and will say one of them, in particular, does a good bit of the damage. This factor is the incumbency advantage, and it hurts our government by promoting apathy and stagnation.
For those unaware, incumbency is the status of actively holding office, and in America, it virtually spells victory come reelection time.
Louis Jacobson for Politifact, in regards to the 2014 House of Representatives election, said, “We counted 390 incumbents who ran on Election Day. Of the remaining 386 incumbents, 373 won, for a winning percentage of 96.6 percent.”
This rate is utterly absurd; there are no two ways about it. Our government should not be so dynastic in nature. Mississippi, in particular, reelected every incumbent for the House and Senate in their last respective elections.
To add insult to injury, 14 states have no laws preventing someone from winning the seat of governor as many times as they are able. The fact is, many people do not care about elections other than the presidential election, and those who do are generally not going to vote for a new candidate.
This means, unless there is actual legislation in place to keep these incumbents from winning over and over again, they will generally keep winning elections.
I would be misleading you if I said the situation is black and white. Molly Reynolds, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution, outlines the cons of enforcing term limits on politicians in an email with The Fix.
“The logic goes, they (new candidates) have neither the time nor the incentive to develop the relevant expertise they need to be good at their jobs. If members don’t have that expertise themselves, they’re more likely to rely on outsiders, including lobbyists, to replace that expertise,” Reynolds said.
I understand these qualms completely. However, if someone does not already have the relevant experience by the time they are elected, or at the very least within a year or two, they have no business serving in the first place.
Lobbyists are, of course, a cancer to our government, but they are an entirely different issue. These reasons against term limits do not outweigh the need we have for proactive, honest politicians.
Even though it would be an immeasurably hard task to change the status quo (it would require a Congressional amendment), it is still immeasurably important to change it.
If you do not want to take some random business major’s word for it, listen to an actual politician. Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin states it better than I ever could in an opinion piece for The Hill:
“My predecessor—a true citizen-legislator who spent his life building a successful roofing company—made a point that has stuck with me. He said that his self-imposed term limit meant that every day he went to work in Congress he knew he had one less day to make a difference. As a result, he woke up every day with a sense of urgency and fearlessness to do the right thing on behalf of his constituents, not do what was expedient for his political career.”
The key word from Gallagher is career. Politics should be about serving the people, and incumbency furthers the opposite. It causes officer-holders to worry about extending their career instead of truly serving their constituents. 
For all the “drain the swamp” talk in the past year, the swamp is only getting deeper. The day America attacks this head-on is the day we rise up, and start back on the track we were set on in 1776.
That is the America I want to live in. An America where the suits change once in a while.