Our founding fathers did intend for Congress members to make a career out of politics. Time has proven their fears, that lifetime politicians can and will be bribed, bought and paid for by various lobbyists.
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, supported congressional term limits, "to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office the members of the Continental Congress," as Jefferson wrote. Richard Henry Lee viewed the absence of legal limits to tenure, together with certain other features of the Constitution, as "most highly and dangerously oligarchic."