Term limits and age caps for federal office: if not, then what?

Politics & Elections
41

I agree although the issue is whether or not age is disqualifying. I don’t think there was a particular reason voters wanted Biden’s age. He had raised his profile as a part of the Obama white house and then leveraged that into the popularity to win a primary and later the general election. It just so happens that he was already in his 70s by the end of Obama’s second term and also didn’t run in 2016. In another universe where he ended up being Al Gore’s vice president from 2000 to 2008 and ran for president in 2008 or 2012, he wouldn’t have had any less appeal to voters than he did in 2020.

It’s not a matter of voters deliberately picking 70+ year olds, it’s that voters are aware of the risks and vote for the candidates anyway. Then the risks materialize into reality. Being the president is an incredibly high pressure job. The guys who get elected in their 50s and 60s don’t look the same by the end of it. It’s also a job where you might need to get woken up in the middle of the night and make a decision that could change the fate of the world and you always need to be ready to make that decision.

It’s rightly a scandal that Biden (and by my guess Trump) was in mental decline by the end of his first term and apparently tried to conceal the extent of it in his reelection bid. It should’ve been an issue in the primaries. But voters have goldfish brains on this and a whole host of other issues and blame everyone but themselves.

42

The trouble is that “really old” happens at very different ages for different people.

Perhaps it should be handled similarly to driver’s license renewal: no chronological age limit, but there are tests you have to pass to make sure you’re still fit to serve.

43

If it’s convention or house standing orders it can be changed on a whim, no need to run the gauntlet of being challenged on the basis of age discrimination.

Good … so as many as 2 out of what, 200?

Whomever the party thinks is the most qualified and capable for the role would suit me. What other criteria is applicable?

That I didn’t know.
Nor do I know how, having learned that, it should impact my proposition. Methinks bugger all but YMMV.
Am I expected to shout “HUZZAH” or summat?

44

Another fun fact: every President from JFK to Bush the Elder was born between 1908 and 1924. When Bill Clinton kicked off the 1946 group, it was quite a leap forward from that group. I sure didn’t expect that we’d still have a President born in 1946 more than 30 years later.

Between the 1946 bunch and Biden (born in 1942), I’d say the 1940s have worn out their welcome. Hell, at this point I hope we skip past the 1950s, despite it being my birth decade: someone born in the 1950s and elected in 2028 would either be in their 70s or turn 70 in their first year in office. This Boomer is ready to give GenX a chance.

45

I gave an example. That you should take it as the sole example implies you think I’m deliberately misleading you to hide the truth. Not taking another step into that quicksand.

46

Yeah, one would have imagined we would at least have had a spread of Boomers over the last 32 years, as we did of “Greatesters” the prior 32, and not just lock into the first cohort — I note the one outlier is “Generation-Jones” Obama, all the way to the early-60s end cusp, before again reverting to the 1940s.

47

I’d set up the House with a 1 term limit. However, at the end of the term, all members of the House from a particular state would decide whether to replace any of the senators from their state, and which of themselves to appoint. (Prior year holders of office would take part in the decision, for those states that have fewer than 3 representatives.)

The issues that I see, leading to the above recommendation:

  1. The ideal judge is someone who is coming in to a matter with no preconceived notions, no personal motivations, etc. And when you’re voting for policy, you are effectively a judge of it. You should have to be sold on it, on the merits, and you should be in a position to listen to arguments from all sides and vote according to what you’ve learned. Politics, being part of a gang, having a future career that can profit by holding certain positions, etc. all take away from that. So just in general, it would be good to have some thing like a rotating body of randomly selected Americans, reviewing and voting on law. And that is, effectively, what the House is supposed to represent. The only reason to not do that is to ensure that you’re getting high-quality candidates in there, and because of national security - you want to limit how many people are getting access to states secrets per year.
  2. On the other hand, the Senate is meant to be composed of serious people who understand things, intimately, and who have earned the respect of their states well enough to be entrusted with great power. They’re meant to be the wall against populism, the tyranny of the majority, etc. Forcing an extra level of review, above a regular popular election is only common sense - that’s how we originally had it. But, previously, they were appointed by the state governments, and the political parties took advantage of that to turn the roles into party representatives rather than state representatives. It became a roll gained through backroom deals and political favors, rather than through solid work for the people.
  3. If we trust that the term limited House representatives are a) suitably divorced from party shenanigans, and b) sufficiently knowledgeable (after completing a 2 year term) of matters of governance to have a reasonable opinion on what would make a good senator, then we have a good alternative to the popular vote and state appointment. They should know themselves and their senators deeply enough to have an informed opinion on the candidates. Use an approval count vote, including the sitting senators on the ballot, and then most of everyone gets to go home.

Obviously, none of this directly references age caps but I suspect that you’d see senators getting voted out as soon as they started to become questionable in any way - let alone for such a minor thing as age.

48

My dear old bean, take whatever umbrage best suits yourself.
It’s not my quicksand that you are in over the Plimsoll line.

The premise is the Committee system as it stands, stands because suits your (collective) purposes.
District 99 voters know their representative who has risen inexhaustibly to be 2nd ranked on the XXXXXX committee and will inevitably succeed to the Chair when the incumbent succumbs to their third heart attack. As a consequent all manner of choice bits of pork and patronage will be consigned their way, as reward for their ballot box loyalty. Voting them out and conceding seniority is not a rational action.

49

They are meant to give a disproportionate share of power to the conservative, small-population states and ensure the US stays rightwing. To enforce the tyranny of the minority.

And for that, it makes perfect sense to not have term limits as they want their membership to be as old, conservative and elitist as possible. A rich old white male bigot’s club.

50

You are wearing unbelievably rosy glasses when you are looking at the people that set up your system.

They were a pretty modern and progressive bunch for their time, I’ll grant you that.

They were also people who owned a lot of land and wanted to tip the scales in favor of the “right” kind of people.

51

Well, let’s say that the Framers of the Constitution wanted to create a system that would lead to the Rapture, and specifically one where the Great Lord Satan would rise up to dominate, call down the Elder spirits from the stars to consume our young, and ultimately prevail against all that is good and holy, before the whole world is disintegrated into dust and pulled into Hell.

And? What had that got to do with whether it’s better to directly vote for Senators or have a layer of remove? Are you sure that you’re making an argument, and not venting about how much you hate the idea of a republic all while also living in the reality of a country that’s abandoning republicanism and having it pointed out, daily, why that doesn’t work very well?

Now look, if you like populism, you dream of an American caudillo that exercises the demands of the majority - be those demands good, bad, selfish, or unwise as may be so long as it’s what 50% plus of the population wants - then you certainly have a path to that end in today’s America. You have the Freedom of Speech to make that argument and political figures that will move as you demand.

Be my guest.

52

Your first sentence is what keeps me from fully supporting term limits. Programs and policies can be complex and legislators gain knowledge about these over time. They also learn how to accomplish tasks and pass legislation within the workings of the government.

53

No, we don’t. We have a society where more and more all that matters is the opinion of a minority. “Right wing Christian men” are not the majority.

54

Any discussion of term limits and age caps is strictly academic; to do either would require a constitutional amendment and I believe no amendment can be ratified in my lifetime. Besides, I think it’s a bad idea. When congressmen serve several terms, some of them develop expertise in a given area- some may become knowledgeable about infrastructure or defense or foreign policy or whatever. This institutional experience is needed for sound legislation. Without it, what you wind up with is whatever the lobbyist with the deepest pockets wants.

55

Okay, so let’s say that the intellectualist progressives just barely edge out to hit 50%, and go on to appoint Robespierre and Lenin as alternating caudillos.

Woohoo?

Lenin and the Communist parties were hardcore on gender equality for most of a century. You don’t want to teach women medicine? Congratulations, here’s your firing squad to report to for execution. Now, you’d think that you’d see some real progress when mass murder your methodology for achieving compliance and yet Western Europe is a better place for women, than the Former Soviet States, because they slowly and reasonably adjusted the laws at a pace that society could adapt to, after going through a series of public debates, every generation, that allowed people to choose their leaders.

The French Revolution left us with the metric system (yay!), a lot more genocide, and the whole thing collapsed and had to be replaced by a monarchy again (sad).

Left wingers have won popular uprisings. They all, universally, sucked. The US and most of Europe chose moderate government and methods to ensure moderation.

Moderation and republicanism isn’t fun. It’s not exciting. It’s dang slow. And it’s been shown to consistently get you everything that you want and dream of for society in a far more effective and reliable way than tyranny does. Eventually, we’ll even get the metric system and I’d bet you that comes faster by increasing the level of compromise and responsibility, and decreasing partisanship and gamesmanship.

56

Except preventing “moderation and republicanism” is the entire point of the Senate. It exists to ensure that a radical and malignant minority have outsized influence on the country.

And the idea that there’s some danger of a takeover by the radical left is silly. They are a tiny minority, and will likely all be killed quite soon anyway. It’s the fascists who are taking over; the people the Senate exists to protect and promote.

57

Left wing radical ideas like health care, pensions and a 5 day work week? Woman’s suffrage?

It has gone out of fashion.
But does the term “class traitor” mean anything to you?

That “left wing” totalitarian government doesn’t work comes from the “totalitarian” part. The socialist part works just fine in some of the most prosperous parts of the world.

Aim for Sweden 2025, not Russia 1920 or Germany 1935

58

Saying that doesn’t make it true.

The Senate comes to us via Plato’s Republic, the Roman Senate, the British House of Lords, and the Framers’ review of history and goal to achieve a system that achieves balancing interests.

To be sure, to get the slave states to agree to such a thing, they had to fiddle with the numbers but that’s not a “goal”. And that number play is really pretty irrelevant once you stop playing politics.

If you look at the politics of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, the European states were all in active conflict with one another, claiming and fighting over colonies. And yet, during that same time you had the Republic of Letters, a pan-national cooperative of intellectuals. Reasonable, informed, and curious people just don’t tend to care about petty BS, no matter how much nationalism, xenophobia, etc. are elements of human nature.

A senate, composed of people that you can actually trust to be moderate, well-intentioned, reasonable people is going to act largely the same, regardless of whether they’re equally pulled from the population or at some slightly modified ratio.

If I was sitting in the Constitutional Convention, I’d have no issue offering the slave states a compromise - they’d still be signing a contract for their own demise - so long as I had faith in the selection criteria for a Senator.

So while it’s true that the states chose worse criteria than the Framers imagined - and they should have argued that out further - the solution to that problem isn’t to fill the Senate with equally distributed morons and cranks, it’s to fill it with people that know things are care about their charges.

59

No, it exists to make “balancing interest” impossible, to permanently slant the nation towards the regressive, bigoted and ignorant. And it worked, too; if a future history is written about the US I expect the Senate will be given as one of the reasons it collapsed into fascism.

60

So far as I see, we’ve ended slavery, ended coverture, ended anti-miscegination laws, enfranchised everyone into the political system over the age of 18, instituted the 40 hour work week, and so on.

You’re going to have to walk me through your math that somehow fails to square the square.