It started with new allegations by whistle-blowers at the State Department that top officials failed to respond in an honest and timely manner to the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in which four Americans were killed. Then there was the shocking admission by the IRS that two years ago they targeted conservative political groups, particularly those affiliated with the Tea Party, in order to challenge their tax-exempt status. Finally, two days ago it was announced that last year the Department of Justice secretly obtained phone records from the offices, homes and cellphones of potentially 100 or more Associated Press journalists in an apparent effort to uncover the source of a leak about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen.
If Republicans are perhaps too quick to shout "Watergate" at times like this, many Democrats seem to believe that what happened during Watergate was wrong only because Republicans were doing it. Using the IRS against political enemies didn't start with Richard Nixon; the Kennedy administration ordered tax audits of steel industry officials when their companies raised prices back in 1962. The main difference is that the Nixon and Obama administrations first denied and then repudiated their transgressions; John F. Kennedy's minions bragged about his. History shows that our freedoms are never more at risk than when they are being trampled upon to popular applause.
Not all reactions to political scandals are purely partisan. I was a college student during the Watergate era, and I remember writing a paper inspired by those events in which I argued for a constitutional amendment limiting the president to a single six-year term. It is an old idea that's been debated periodically since the Constitutional Convention in 1787. What appealed to me at the time was the fact that so many of the Watergate abuses could be traced to Nixon's obsession with getting re-elected, as well as the fact that those excesses undermined the electoral mandate that should have resulted from Nixon's re-election.
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Jack Roberts: Is it time we limited presidents to one six-year term? | OregonLive.com