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John Mellencamp Wants To Give Presidents Four Terms, Senators Four Years

John Mellencamp: U.S. Presidents Should Get Four Terms
Ryan Buxton
By 

Senior Editor, HuffPost Live

John Mellencamp has a plan for improving the way the U.S. government is run: give presidents the opportunity to serve for 16 years.

During a conversation with HuffPost Live's Marc Lamont Hill about his new album "Plain Spoken," Mellencamp spoke on Farm Aid, the benefit concert he launched with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985, which Mellencamp said educated him about the troubling connection between the government and big agriculture.

When asked for a solution to those issues, Mellencamp suggested lengthening the term limit for presidents and shortening it for those in the legislative branch.

"A president can have four terms. If you're a senator, you got four years, and it's an honor to represent your constituency and your area, but after four years, you're done," Mellencamp recommended. "If I lived in your neighborhood and I was your congressman, I had to do what you people said because it's an honor. You people are the people who put me there. That's what it pretends to be, but there's all these special interests. So special interests, then, are all of a sudden gone."

The legendary singer added that allowing presidents to remain in the Oval Office for longer would give them enough time to truly exercise their power and make a difference.

"You have a president that has enough time to get something accomplished and something done. I think Roosevelt had four terms, didn't he?" Mellencamp said of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served longer than any other president in history. "I think we should go back to that, and we should go back to four years for a senator, four years for a congressman, and I think we'd see a huge change in our society."

See the full HuffPost Live conversation with John Mellencamp here.

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