Over 75% of voters want maximum age limit for elected officials, poll shows
Over 75% of voters want maximum age limit for elected officials, poll shows
Over three-fourths of Americans think there should be a maximum age limit for elected officials, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey.
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I don't understand why there aren't term limits across the board either. Some Congress wo/men have been there for decades ffs!
Definitely. Age limits are difficult. Some people lose it early. Some never do.
Two terms and you're out seems to me to mostly resolve this.
You can even make it just two consecutive terms. I think I'm largely fine with that. At least it's better than the alternative.
Also, lifetime appointment. That was designed at a different time. Scotus should be a (reasonably long) single term. Then you're done with the federal judicial system.
Yes, can't endorse this enough. Judicial appointments need a term limit, no matter the position. Maybe 10 years maximum.
10 years is nice to because it wouldn't line up exactly with new presidents, so it would guarantee different parties would most likely get to pick.
In 1789, the average lifespan for a Supreme Court justice was 67 years. By 1975, that expectancy had risen to 82 years.
Sure, but how long were they on the court?
Just let agelimits apply to judges as well and make judges appoint judges while you're at it to minimize the politicizing of the bench.
Looking at the way the current SCOTUS is, the last thing I'd want is Justices appointing their replacements.
They should be elected.
Age limits are difficult.
They're not that hard, and they're simple and direct, and we already use them. Don't overcomplicate it.
Yes! Term limits are the answer, not age limits. It’s effectively the same thing but protects us in two ways (instead of just one: ie age) and does so without the slippery slope that an age limit would entail.
If a pilot is forced to retire at 65 due to fear of killing a couple hundred, there is absolutely zero reason someone in charge near 400 million shouldn't have a maximum age cap
the slippery slope that an age limit would entail.
Can you elaborate?
He means that people have different rates of cognitive decline than others, so if you like this 70 year old politician and he's great, why not?
I think that's ridiculous. Term AND age limits would make much brighter futures. We should be electing officials that will have to live under the shade of the trees they planted, which is not the case for most US politicians today.
Yeah the slippery slope makes no sense. I get that there isn't a precise date to determine the start of cognitive decline, but why not just put an avery one as a limit in the law then? We do it for expiration dates as well.
If there were age limits it should be well below the point of any cognitive decline, because it's also about having younger people in power who can think and plan on a scale of several decades, because that's how long they have left to live.
I'm thinking like 50.
The problem with setting the age limit too low is that people of that age range might not feel represented.
To give an example, I'm 48. One of my upcoming concerns is retirement. Will it be able to afford to retire? Will I need to work part time after "retiring" just to survive?
If every politician in a position of power was too young, retirement might not seem to them to be an important issue. After all, when you're 30, retirement seems forever away. They could enact policies that are great for people under 40 but devastating to people approaching retirement.
That's why, while I definitely think politicians like McConnell and Feinstein should have retired long ago, I'm leery about setting too low of a forced retirement age.
Also, you do want people with experience there. Having a rotating door of only young people doesn't really help anything.
The door wouldn't be rotating anymore than it is now.
And what's your source on young people not helping anything? All the times in US history that we made the most progress were under young Democrat presidents.
I didn't say young people don't help anything. I said having only new young people all the time doesn't help. Having people with experience is a good thing.
I'm 31 and I'm pretty fuckin concerned with retirement. Because if I'm not now, I'll probably never be able to.
If we made this change, it would serve as a lever to help increase the age at which we can vote. Which is what these fuckers really want.
Considering a lower age limit would have to be put in place by existing politicians, that particular slope is not slippery at all. And slippery-slope arguments are categorically invalid except when you can point to a specific reason why doing something will make it likely to be done in excess.
I don’t care about term limits. I don’t care about age.
What I DO care about is whether or not they :
A. Are right-wing corporate goon pieces of shit - like Sinema, McConnell, Manchin… in which case, I don’t care how we remove them - just do it.
B. have cognitive function.
They changed the rules for presidential terms only AFTER FDR kept being re-elected. I would have been fine had he stayed alive and president another 15 years.
AOC can be in office as long as she likes. So can Katie Porter. And can Bernie Sanders - at least until his brain starts to show it is melting in the same way that McConnell and Feinstein’s have.
I want something similar to the DMV’s driving or a hospital admittance cognitive function test… just make sure they can do things like tell you their birthday, address, etc.
Otherwise I don’t care.
I think testing for cognitive function is going to prove impossibly difficult - or at least for now. How do we set and quantify an acceptable value for cognitive function? How will we execute testing? When do we test? How often? Who will do the testing? How do we counter for potential performance drugs for test candidates? Do we notify the public on the test findings? There's just a lot involved with making this the barrier to entry vs age or term limits.
Yeah I was wrestling with this in the same way. It's too hard. That's not even mentioning that cognitive function or mental acuity isn't really a straight or constant line. You could test someone who's off in outer space most days but you test them on the right day they'd ace any cognitive test you put in front of them.
Oh absolutely. I'm a walking, talking banana if you catch me at the wrong time or on the wrong day.
Also, if we went this route and tested for cognitive function- I'd 100% guarantee that our politicians would be on Adderall or some other amphetamine...if they weren't already.
It could be a test administered anonymously and run by board certified psychologists, doctors, neurologists, etc.
They could give a grade, and then if they fail within a certain margin, they could be put on a sort of probation, where they'd need to make a passing grade the next test or be ejected from their office.
I just worry this would end up disenfranchising minorities somehow. Tests for voting don't have the best history
So you advocate your style of politics with lifetime appointments? Certainly nothing authoritarian to see here
They're saying that politicians like AOC, Katie Porter, Sanders, etc. are high quality public servants, and that high quality public servants should be able to be elected as long as they have cognitive function.
On one hand, in a hypothetical and ideal scenario, that would be nice to have for us voters.
On the other hand, even if an elected official does great work and has a great track record, should they be able to just serve indefinitely until their brain gives out? There'd be a lot of potential problems such as having entrenched and corruptible political operators, even if they started out good, who prevent "fresh blood" from entering politics. It'd be neat to see a study comparing different countries and political systems where there are age barriers and term limits vs those that don't have them.
High quality public servants in who's eyes? I'm sure Republicans could argue someone like Rand Paul or Marco Rubio are a high quality public servant.
There would need to be a consistency across the board.
I think that's their point: That maybe, as long as a candidate is mentally fit, then voters ought to be able to continue voting for them if they feel like the candidate is still worth voting for.
Honestly, if there was some kind of magical bullet to simply ban candidates who are mentally unfit (i.e. losing their marbles) from holding office that couldn't be exploited, I think a lot of people would find that preferable to an age limit.
That doesn't address issues like politicians who are too technologically illiterate to do things like open PDF files, though.
Tech illiteracy testing becomes a barrier that harms poor though.
Poor people are more likely to be tech illiterate due to lack of exposure to technology or classes that had access to tech.
Tech test = no people who aren't rich able to make it into office. I'm not for that.
I do wish there was a requirement for them AFTER they were in office to be given mandatory lessons on really basic fundamentals of tech, and THEN be required to pass to keep their office, but you'd have to be really careful on who gets to make the test, how it's administered, etc. due to an ability to meddle in that to push for your team.
...But yes - a double-blind "marbles test" administered anonymously on both ends by a 3rd party board-certified medical team would be nice.
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no man you're boring because you still use 'cuck' unironically so you identify openly as a dipshit rightoid
There didn't used to be but after FDR hit 4 terms in a row, they passed the 22nd Amendment in 1947, it was ratified in 1951.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
A rare example where a Gentleman's Agreement that is important to how our government runs was actually codified.
I think the idea in the Senate is that those people would have been seasoned bureaucrats who were intimately familiar with law - lawyers in particular. The House was more the everyday man representing the people of his district.
Now that we vote for senators, too, I'm not sure what role they really play. I'd also add that we need to remove the cap on headcount in the house. I did the napkin math once and we should have something like 2.5x the representatives we have now, IIRC.
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I used to feel this way about Career Politicians but they actually have the opposite problem in some other countries. Politicians having personal businesses makes it very, very easy to bribe them.
Lobbying straight up makes bribery legal for career politicians. How could it possibly be easier than that?
You don't understand why the people who vote on various things won't vote against themselves?? I'm guessing it's the same reason why voting on pay raises for themselves always pass.
That's easy to fix: exempt anyone in office at the time the bill passes.
That’s easy to fix: exempt anyone in office at the time the bill passes.
Don't think that'll work on its own, as they will want to protect the party that gives them their power from, for after they leave office.
voting on pay raises for themselves always pass.
The only votes congress has taken regarding their own pay is voting to deny a raise. Every year Congress is set to get an automatic COLA raise, u less they refuse it via vote it automatically kicks in. Those are the votes congress has been conducting. They have voted in pay raises for congressional staff members.