Walker never has to worry about health care or term limits.

Scott Walker has raised a family on the taxpayer dime. Those same taxpayers also never had a problem paying for Walker's free health care while they had to struggle with rising premiums, larger contributions at work, or preexisting conditions.

And while Walker talked about backing term limits, he was always above all that. jsonline:

Scott Walker pushes term limits, but broke pledge as county exec: At a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire last week, Gov. Scott Walkercalled for 12-year term limits for the U.S. House, Senate and federal judiciary. And he took credit for limiting his own terms during his 22-year political career.

"I've self-imposed them myself. I've never been in an elected position more than 10 years," said Walker … But in 2008, Walker failed to keep a term-limit pledge of his own when he sought a second full term as county executive.

Of course as a career politician who’s always running for something, he made a convincing case for giving the boot to lingering politicians:

"I am open to a run for a full term in 2004, but will not run beyond that term." "People start looking over their shoulders instead of looking ahead...we need to think more about the next generation than we do about the next election. The longer people serve it's just human nature, the more you start worrying about the next election more than you do about the next generation," Walker said in New Hampshire.

Ever get the idea Walker has his own designs on changing the Constitution, "dropping the bomb" on that someday:

He told his audience he supported federal term limits even though it would require amending the U.S. Constitution.

What would a 12 year term limit mean to Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s 37 years career, or Paul Ryan’s 17. It’d be kind of nice not having them around.

Jim Sensenbrenner of Menomonee Falls said, "Term limits take away the right of voters to re-elect the representatives they choose. Effective leadership does not have an expiration date." 

Republicans wrong on Term Limits and Balanced Budget Amendment.

If you ask conservatives who regularly read this site and other more liberal bloggers, you'd think we were partisan or something. But really, this and other sites continue to suggest solutions, instead of just whining about the problem.

Two guys who have been right on so many levels, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, took a look at a few "solutions" from the right will only make things worse. There take on "term limits" is the one that stands out. Dumb Ron Johnson recently said in an interview that Mitt Romney told him how he would only be president one term, get what he wanted done, and move on. That didn't sit well with me, and Mann and Ornstein's trashing of term limits explains why:

We’ve all heard the laments — we’ve made some of them ourselves — that Washington is broken. Here are (some) much-praised solutions we should avoid:

Term limits will save us: Term limits, we’re told, would replace them with citizen-lawmakers who cared less about reelection and more about acting on behalf of their fellow citizens — thus restoring Congress to its intended role as the citadel of deliberative democracy.

Does it work? Instead of channeling ambition in the right, public-interest direction, term limits have the opposite effect: New lawmakers immediately begin planning for ways to reach the next level, or to find lucrative lobbying jobs when they are term-limited out. They have no incentive to do things for the long-term and no regard for maintaining their own institutions. With the loss of expertise among senior lawmakers, power devolves to permanent staff members and to lobbyists.

The magic of a Balanced Budget Amendment:

Another hardy perennial … After all, 49 states have such an amendment in their constitutions, so why not Washington?

In fact, the states’ balanced budgets are the best reason to avoid one at the federal level. When a downturn occurs, basic economic theory tells us that we need “counter-cyclical” policies to inject adrenaline into a fatigued economy — meaning more government spending and/or lower taxes. States do the opposite: A downturn means less revenue and more demands from unemployed residents … The fiscal drag from states in the recent Great Recession amounted to $800 billion, which the Obama administration’s stimulus plan barely offset. A federal balanced-budget amendment would only have aggravated the downturn — the economic equivalent of bleeding an anemic patient.

Maintaining fiscal flexibility is critical in the American political system, particularly in a globalized economy where less and less of our destiny is under our control. And the experience of the 1990s demonstrates that the White House and Congress together can take the steps needed to balance the budget under existing rules.