Lead by term-limits example

South Carolina's junior senator is widely known for standing firmly on principle -- at times to a fault. But while Jim DeMint's renewed push for congressional term limits is a rather quixotic quest, it shouldn't be reflexively dismissed as just another exercise in ideologically driven futility.

Instead, Sen. DeMint's dogged pursuit of this goal should serve as a timely alarm against the perils of a perennial political class holding power in Washington.

Sen. DeMint is now seeking a "sense of the Senate" vote in favor of term limits. Last year, he proposed a constitutional amendment restricting Senate members to two full terms and House members to three. That's the number of terms he will have served in each chamber by 2016, which will mark his 18th consecutive year in Congress.

The senator's Washington spokesman, Wesley Denton, told us Thursday that the senator "doesn't intend to run again but he hasn't ruled it out."

Yet as a champion of term limits, Sen. DeMint should clearly rule it out. After all, as he pointed out in a release last week: "Our founders warned us about creating a class of career politicians who amass personal power instead of fighting for the people they are supposed to represent. Decades of permanent politicians have left us with a $15 trillion debt, and a federal budget and tax code that favor special interests with the highest paid lobbyists."

And if you don't want to take Sen. DeMint's word for it, ponder two Founding Fathers' insights included in his release. Thomas Jefferson wrote that term limits were needed "to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office."

George Mason, during Virginia's convention on ratification of the U.S. Constitution, offered this prescience: "Nothing is so essential to the preservation of a republican government as a periodical rotation. Nothing so strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents as the certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was taken, where he must participate in their burdens."

While it's a political certainty that an amendment assuring "periodical rotation" of federal lawmakers is, at best, a long way off, they can set admirable term-limit examples of their own -- as Sen. DeMint should in 2016.

As for those who linger beyond 18 years in Congress, for now, returning them to "the general mass" remains one of the electorate's "burdens."