In Alabama’s 6th congressional district, one candidate, Gerrick Wilkins, is making congressional term limits a key issue in his race. He is so committed to term limits that he recently authored a book on the need for term limits titled, “Unshackling Democracy”. And today, I am pleased he’s joining us.
Hey, I’m so excited today. My first time I’ve interviewed an author and a congressional candidate, Gerrick Wilkins is joining us and he has just written the book, Unshackling Democracy. So excited about this book. Loved every page of it. It was really excellent. But can you tell us about the book and what your motivation was for writing the book?
Absolutely. I am so excited that this book’s coming out in just a few short weeks, “Unshackling Democracy, Embracing Term Limits and Empowering Citizens”. And I’ll tell you that this all started for me many, many years ago. Term limits has always been at the forefront. I think it’s one of the most critical things we can do to reform our government. And then it just happens that back in March, our current congressman, who has been a proponent of term limits, at least in word, came and said, “I know I promised I’d only run five terms, but I’m just doing too much good, so I’m gonna break my promise and run again.” And that rubbed me the wrong way. And then come to find out he’d signed the term limits pledge and didn’t even wanna support the Term Limits bill a few years back.
And US Term Limits had to pressure him into keeping his word there. So at that point, I got to work on this book, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ll tell you, I’ve been in the auto industry for 24 years as a businessman. So I’ve used some great examples from the auto industry. I’ve done a great historical background of what our founding fathers truly intended.
We’ve looked through the aspects of the presidential term limits amendment, and we’ve really made it not just a strong case for term limits, but very readable, very fun, and hopefully can help us engage with the American people so we can finally get term limits passed in the United States. So I’m really excited to be here talking about it. It’s a fun book, especially on a subject like term limits. Who would have thought that we could make term limits engaging? But I think we’ve done just that in this book.
Oh, it’s great. I love some of the comparisons you do to the auto industry about rotating tires and changing the oil. Can you give us a couple examples of those?
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve touched on some of those, but one of my favorites is how we talk about upgrading models. Every few years, these auto manufacturers have a new model come out because the current one is outdated. And when you think about the fact that we’ve got career politicians who I’ve said on the campaign trail have driven us into the ditch and we think that these same people are gonna be able to get us out, well, anyone that’s ever been in that situation knows that when you’re in the ditch, you’ve gotta have a change of trajectory, a change of plans, and most importantly, a change of drivers. And that’s exactly what our country needs right now. We’ve got a massive debt of almost $34 trillion. And we’ve got the same ideas coming. And guess what? It’s the career politicians that have put us in this problem. And it’s time for us to change directions. It’s time for us to upgrade models. It’s time for us to get fresh blood in Congress. And it’s time for us to enact term limits.
One of the parts of the books that I found most interesting is you going back and looking at the reasons why term limits wasn’t included originally with the founding father’s pass for our Constitution. Can you give us a couple little tidbits on that?
Yeah, absolutely. And what a lot of people fail to realize is we actually did have term limits in the Articles of Confederation. The original founding documents had what they called rotation of office in there. So we have some of those examples in there. And I can tell you that I don’t think our founding fathers ever anticipated having the influence of lobbyists, the amount of money that’s come into politics the way we do today, or I can tell you, they would have pushed to have this in there. And we see that many of our founding fathers talk about the importance of rotation in office, talk about the importance of citizen legislators. And it’s one of the reasons that I decided to run for office because we need people to say, “Hey, we don’t want career politicians. We want citizen lawmakers. We want people to take a break from their careers and go to serve our country just for a few years.”
And it’s kind of funny ’cause when I talked to my wife about this, she said, “Well, I don’t wanna go to DC.” I said, “I don’t either. It’s a swamp. That’s one of the things we’re trying to clean up with term limits.” And I said, “But I believe in term limits so much, that’s why not only have I signed the term limits pledge for my run, not only have I committed to supporting term limits, I’ve also agreed to only serving three terms.” And my wife said she’ll hold me accountable to that. So I tell everyone, I have life-imposed term limits, and with 24 years of marriage, I can tell you that’s a real important aspect.
I’m sure it is. Hey, I’m sure you saw the latest Gallup poll where it says that Congress only has like a 13% job performance approval. Do you think if we were to enact term limits, that their job performance approval would increase? Do you think people would start to… That would restore people’s faith in Congress?
Absolutely. I think what we need is options at the ballot box. We need fresh ideas. Like I said, it’s these career politicians that got us into these problems. And all they continue doing is fighting back and forth, not coming up with real solutions. And we’ve got real problems in this country. You look at what’s going on at the southern border right now. My goodness, there’s an invasion going on there and these career politicians are doing nothing about it. But we get fresh ideas in there, we’ll definitely see a change. And it amazes me because you look at these congressional races, and when there’s no incumbent running, just like we see in Alabama’s second congressional district, there’s 21 people running for that office. But guess what? When there’s an incumbent, they’ve got such an unfair advantage with the funding they have. None of the PACs wanna support someone that’s not an incumbent. There’s no opportunity for competition. And competition is what makes our country great. And that’s what we need. We need these fresh ideas to really come and clean out the swamp. ‘Cause I can tell you, I’ve spent some time in DC working on this book.
I’ve been privileged to talk with some great members of our congressional delegation who told me some of the stories about what’s going on. And we need fresh faces in DC to fix our country’s problems.
We sure do. We sure do. And I understand Congressman Ralph Norman wrote the foreword. He’s our lead sponsor in the House on our term limits resolution.
Absolutely. Congressman Norman has become a good friend of mine over the course of this book. He has been a huge supporter in it. He gave me great insight into developing different key ideas in this book. He’s told me about some of the challenges and in fact has had me at breakfast with other members of Congress to talk through these issues. And I was very, very happy that he agreed to write the foreword for this book. He is a staunch supporter of term limits. And we need more leadership like Ralph in Congress and that’s one of the reasons I’m hoping to join him really soon.
Oh, that’s great. So how do people get more information about your book and about you? ‘Cause I understand that you are running for Alabama’s sixth congressional district. So how do they get more information? Because we obviously love people that support wholeheartedly term limits.
Absolutely. Well, if you want more information on the book, we have a website, Unshackling Democracy, which you can log in to sign up for the pre-orders on that site. But I’d also encourage you to visit my campaign website, wilkinsforal.com, Wilkins F-O-R-A-L dot com. You can learn more about the campaign. You can learn more about our initiatives to really improve Congress through term limits. In fact, our slogan for the campaign is “Driving change in limiting terms”. So wilkinsforal.com is a great place to learn about the campaign. And then sign up on our website for the book, unshacklingdemocracy.com. That way you can know when it’s out, you can pre-order one, you can find out about events that we’re gonna have related to it. And it’s just gonna be a great time for us to get this out and hopefully we can finally push to get term limits done. I was so disappointed to see that we had those 19 members that voted down, even bringing the bill to the vote.
It’s just ridiculous that these entrenched politicians are so opposed to it. And you talked about the number of people in favor of it. I think the only ones that aren’t all live in DC.
That’s right. The rest of the country’s in favor. So hey, Gerrick, I am so glad you joined us today. And I loved your book. And I urge everybody, go out and get your book, “Unshackling Democracy”. Fantastic book. And thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much, Holly, I appreciate it. Have a great one.
You too.
Congress has the lowest job performance approval rating in 50 years. Congressional Term Limits is the answer and we’ve gotta make it happen. Please go to termlimits.org and get involved today. And be sure to share this program with your family and friends every week. This is Holly Robichaud for Term Limits Breaking News. I’ll see you next week.