I spent thirty years in wealth management and investments; testifying as an expert witness in federal and state courts on fiduciary duty; and coaching high school track, football, and rugby. One lesson holds across every one of those arenas: You don’t keep a coach who goes 0-10 every season. You bench him, hire someone who can actually win, and get back to work.
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In Washington, we do the opposite. We keep returning the same professional politicians who have turned trillion-dollar deficits into routine line items, open borders into settled policy, and press conferences into self-serving moments trying to get a viral sound bite. Career politicians are not a feature of the republic the Founders designed. They represent a bad habit that we just can’t break.
The men who wrote the Constitution never imagined Congress as a permanent address. The First Congress paid members $6 a day — no annual salary, no pension office, no permanent staff — and sessions lasted a few weeks before members went home to their farms, law offices, and merchant businesses. George Washington retired to Mount Vernon after two terms not because he lacked experience, but because he understood that staying close to the people kept leaders honest. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison followed his example.
The Anti-Federalists for rotation in office precisely to prevent a detached ruling class from calcifying around the levers of power. They warned that distant lawmakers would stop serving constituents and start serving themselves. They were visionaries. When annual salaries arrived and Washington became a year-round enterprise in the 19th century, the citizen-legislator gave way to the professional political class. The Founders’ warning became the country’s default operating system.
The track record is easy to follow. During the Biden-Harris years, CPI hit 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest reading in over forty years and more than enough to qualify as the worst inflation since the Carter administration. A southern border that functioned like a revolving door processed more traffic in some months than entire American cities hold in a year. The Afghanistan withdrawal handed the Taliban an estimated $7.12 billion in U.S.-supplied military equipment, per a congressionally mandated Pentagon report.
I have spent my career working fiduciary duty from both sides of the advisory and litigation table. No board I have ever dealt with would tolerate that level of sustained underperformance for a single fiscal quarter, let alone four years. Yet we keep sending the same names back to Washington and then act surprised when nothing changes.
The financial math highlights the accountability problem. More than half of all sitting members of Congress are millionaires, roughly fourteen times wealthier than the typical American household. They did not build that wealth on a $174,000 annual salary. They built it by learning which subcommittee controls which earmark, which lobbyist cuts the largest campaign check, and how to trade on information that would put a private-sector portfolio manager in front of a federal judge. I have testified as an expert witness in securities disputes where the pattern was identical: When managers are answerable only to themselves, fiduciary duty evaporates.
Congress is not at all different. A congressional stock-trading ban is long overdue — real divestiture, not disclosure theater — but it is a half-measure without term limits. Career politicians need shorter leases.
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Critics argue that term limits would strip Congress of institutional knowledge. But the men who wrote the Constitution — farmers, lawyers, and merchants with active day jobs — designed a government that defeated the British Empire and produced both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, all without a single committee staffer or K Street retainer. “Institutional knowledge” in the modern Congress mostly means knowing which lobbyist to call after a committee vote. Real expertise sits in the Executive Branch and in the private sector, not in the hands of someone who has spent four decades treating a Senate seat as a family heirloom. A citizen-legislator who has signed paychecks understands what it costs when regulation kills a job, because he has written those checks. A citizen-legislator who has coached in a neighborhood knows what crime looks like when it rises, because he knows the kids who live there. Skin in the game counts for more than committee seniority ever will.
Here is the disconnect that should produce genuine outrage: congressional approval has fallen to just 10 percent — barely above its all-time low — with 86 percent of Americans actively disapproving, tying the record high in Gallup’s tracking. Separately, 83 percent of Americans across party lines support congressional term limits, including 78 percent of Democrats and 89 percent of Republicans, per an April 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. And yet 97 percent of incumbents were re-elected in 2024, up from 94 percent in 2022. That is incumbency, functioning as designed: name recognition, gerrymandered districts, and campaign war chests assembled from the very access-peddling that drives the approval number into the floor. Political scientists call it the “incumbency paradox.” I call it a fiefdom.
The sharpest objection deserves more than a dismissal: If voters keep sending these people back, what makes term limits anything but anti-democratic? The objection has the most force in the House, where two-year terms are the Constitution’s tightest leash on federal power. But a 97-percent incumbency rate measures structural capture. Gerrymandered districts reduce most House races to a party primary dominated by organized money and base-voter turnout, not the broader electorate. Campaign war chests built over decades lock out credible challengers before a single vote is cast. Term limits remove the monopoly that turns the vote into a formality. The Anti-Federalists, who argued hardest for a directly democratic House, also argued the loudest for mandatory rotation in office. They understood that competitive elections — not just elections — are the mechanism of democratic accountability.
The structural fix is not complicated: three terms in the House, two in the Senate. The American people already impose limits on the presidency through the 22nd Amendment. Extending that logic to the Legislative Branch is constitutional logic applied consistently. Pair that with a trading ban that carries real enforcement and real penalties, and with trimmed congressional staff and tighter per diem budgets that force members to maintain genuine roots in the districts they claim to represent. None of this solves every policy failure. What it does is stop rewarding the people responsible for the largest share of those failures.
The professional political class will fight term limits with every procedural maneuver they have perfected over decades. They have a strong incentive to do so. The Founders were not democrats in the modern sense; they were republicans who feared self-perpetuating elites at least as much as they feared unchecked majorities.
My oldest son graduated from West Point and proudly serves our country. My younger boys are working their way through college. I coached their teams and served as scoutmaster because I believe that discipline and accountability still mean something, that the people responsible for outcomes should bear the weight of failing them. The same principle applies to the people we send to Washington. Bench the pros. Let citizens back on the field.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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