
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States and a proponent of “rotation in office.” (Photo: Pictures From History/Newscom)
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States and a proponent of “rotation in office.” (Photo: Pictures From History/Newscom)
There is an old quotation that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
For Americans, who have a unique and exceptional heritage, it is important that we remember the lessons of our past and engage with the first principles and ideas that have come before us.
Just prior to his inauguration, President Donald Trump compared his movement to the one that brought Andrew Jackson to the White House in the early 19th century. And on Wednesday, he followed up on this commitment and will reportedly hang a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office.
“There hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson,” Trump said of his comparison to the seventh president. “Andrew Jackson? What year was Andrew Jackson? That was a long time ago.”
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One of the central themes of Jackson’s election, like Trump’s, was that a permanent political class had rooted itself in the nation’s capital and needed to be expunged. Many bureaucrats had spent their entire careers in Washington, D.C., despite, in many cases, their incompetence, corruption, and general uselessness.
While most Americans toiled through economic downturns and the challenges of the private sector, government workers remained immune from downturns and distant from the concerns of the people they had been appointed to serve.
Jackson believed it was the right of the people to elect representatives who could “fire” bad civil servants. In 1829, Jackson pushed Congress to ensure term limits for bureaucrats—limiting their time in office to four years, after which they would have to apply for their job again.
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The issue of draining the swamp will become increasingly prominent as term limits and other proposals are made to contain the power of the new permanent political class both in Congress and in the bureaucracy.
The following is an excerpt from Jackson’s first annual message to Congress in which he made one of the most elegant defenses of the “rotation in office” idea in American history: