Term Limits and Power

I'm reading a case for my Constitutional Law class about term limits. Well, it's not really about term limits; the term limits are really sort of incidental to the case, and it's really about whether states may impose restrictions on the members of Congress they elect. But the form of restriction in question is term limits, and the dissenters in the case, Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, Scalia, and O'Connor, argue that the majority, which strikes down Arkansas' term limits on Congressmen from Arkansas, were limiting the right of voters in choosing their representatives. They're wrong. Term limits do not enhance the power of the people to choose their representatives; in fact, the ability to impose term limits does not enhance the power of the people to choose their representatives. If 50%+1 of the people in a given constituency wish to impose a binding rule of term limits, they may do so, simply by exercising their constitutional right to not vote for the incumbant!!! It's very simple, really, you see. To suggest that de jure term limits are required to prevent entrenched incumbency is to suggest a certain weakness in the electorate, since they may at will impose a de facto term limit rule however they wish. If, in fact, voters do not impose such a rule, it can only be supposed that this is because they do not consider the drawbacks of entrenched incumbents to outweigh the benefits of seniority or the whimsy of partisanship or whatever. That constitutes a decision by the voters that keeping incumbents out is relatively unimportant to them. It is another thing altogether to suggest reforms of campaign finance or the Congressional mailings system or whatever that might prevent incumbents from hampering voters in their attempt to make an informed decision; those are good ideas. Perhaps even a reform of the primary system which can force a constituency to choose between an entrenched, corrupt incumbent in the party they like and a genuinely unpleasant challenger from the party they don't like. But to suggest that voters must be protected from their own desire to vote for someone who, really, wouldn't be good for them is to deny the very premise of democracy: the voters choose their representatives.

And for what it's worth, I do think that the campaign to install term limits (which has been surprisingly absent of late) is one with an undertone of voter powerlessness. There's nothing you can do, the system is too strong, we need to limit these abusive elites, we are told. But we have the power to limit those elites anyway, by voting them out, and term limits are a restriction only on the right of the voters to elect whomever they choose. Incumbent Congressmen have no right to be in the next Congress: that is a privilege that must be granted to them by the voters. Therefore the only right that term limits abridge is that of the voter. And I think the point of the push for term limits is not really to get a Constitutional Amendment limiting Congressional terms, which won't ever happen, but to reduce participation among the disaffected, since after all it's Republicans advocating for it anyway.