Cite as: 514 U. S. 779 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
tion expressed concern about the "abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office." 24 At several ratification conventions, participants proposed amendments that would have required rotation.25
The Federalists' responses to those criticisms and proposals addressed the merits of the issue, arguing that rotation was incompatible with the people's right to choose. As we noted above, Robert Livingston argued:
a rotation may be provided for"); id., at 62 (Mass., Kingsley) ("[W]e are deprived of annual elections, have no rotation, and cannot recall our members; therefore our federal rulers will be masters, and not servants"); Samuel Bryan, "Centinel I," Independent Gazetteer (Phil., Oct. 5, 1787), 1 Debate on the Constitution 52, 61 (B. Bailyn ed. 1990) (hereinafter Bailyn) ("[A]s there is no exclusion by rotation, [Senators] may be continued for life, which, from their extensive means of influence, would follow of course"); Letter from George Lee Turberville to Madison (Dec. 11, 1787), 1 Bailyn 477, 479 ("Why was not that truely republican mode of forcing the Rulers or sovereigns of the states to mix after stated Periods with the people again—observed"); Mercy Otis Warren, "A Columbian Patriot" (Boston, Feb. 1788), 2 Bailyn 284, 292 ("There is no provision for a rotation, nor any thing to prevent the perpetuity of office in the same hands for life. . . . By this neglect we lose the advantages of that check to the over-bearing insolence of office, which by rendering him ineligible at certain periods, keeps the mind of man in equilibrio, and teaches him the feelings of the governed").
24 Letter of Dec. 20, 1787, from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison. 1 id., at 209, 211. In 1814, in another private letter, Jefferson expressed the opinion that the States had not abandoned the power to impose term limits. See Letter of Jan. 31, 1814, to Joseph C. Cabell, in 14 Writings of Thomas Jefferson 82 (A. Lipscomb ed. 1904). Though he noted that his reasoning on the matter "appears to me to be sound," he went on to note: "but, on so recent a change of view, caution requires us not to be too confident, and that we admit this to be one of the doubtful questions on which honest men may differ with the purest of motives; and the more readily, as we find we have differed from ourselves on it." Id., at 83. The text of Jefferson's response clearly belies the dissent's suggestion that Jefferson "himself did not entertain serious doubts of its correctness." Post, at 874, n. 14.
25 See n. 40, infra.
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