I often wonder how many problems would be fixed by adding a 2 term limit to the House and Senate.
But these are just both band aids on America's problems. We are infested with a religion that denies science and education, and we have a political party controlled by 3 families that feel entitled to as much as they can have at the expense of the entire nation. We would need to limit the power of money in politics and reform public education to raise a generation that can see the right for what it is.
Term limits are necessary, there should be no such thing as a "career politician". A politician should be required to have actual skills, and not just a nice smile.
Experience with politics is meaningless, there should be NO establishment. It is always the new guy who reveals the truth to the people, which is a good thing. Experience only results in being able to lie to the public, to further the establishment. Otherwise it becomes us vs them.
People will do anything to maintain power. It should be one year and out, nobody should be able to get rich by becoming a politician.
A good first step would be to get rid of Diane Feinstein.
The highest level of government is the worst place I can think of to have a cadre of amateurs running the show.
Where you err deeply is if you believe their skillset is about running the country.
It's not. It's about getting re-elected and trafficking influence.
This is not the case in other fields such as Engineering, Medicine, Education, or Law. More experienced engineers, doctors, lawyers, and educators tend to be better at their craft. Failing to keep up with new methodology/technology is also a problem.
It's almost like the quality of the person is more important than their age or seniority.
Now, I don't have any first-hand experience with legislatures. However, based on analogies in fields I'm more familiar with, I am a bit suspicious of the claim that there aren't any advantages to seniority and experience.
Also, consider this concrete question: would term limits fix the student debt problem? I don't see any arguments in this thread that it would.
Student loans fuel retirement accounts for old people.
Lack of upward mobility helps old rich people.
Tax cuts for the rich by and large help old people.
We have a nation governed by geezers who only care about geezers.
You can consider this in a really simple, but also regular and real, scenario. You're faced by a decision. One choice you think is bad for the country but is strongly supported by various special interest groups who will likely run major positive advertising and other positive 'propaganda' for you, if you go that route. The other decision is good for the nation but vehemently opposed by these same interests. You can expect negative advertising and other consequences should you go this route. It's not hard to see which decision a "professional" politician is going to pick, regardless of whether they're 20 or 90 years old.
Ideally this would all be a nonstarter since you stay in office by getting elected. So do what's good and you get elected again, right? But this goes out the window when people are so easily swayed by the media and misinformation. A very large chunk of people don't measure the results of the nation independently, just based on what they hear in the media or by easily exploited emotional responses.
Our system was originally designed specifically to avoid professional politicians. The initial articles of confederation included term limits. It was only removed after substantial debate. An anonymous essay penned in response to this decision suggested that people who were elected for long periods of time would become "inattentive to the public good, callous, selfish, and the fountain of corruption" continuing with,"Even good men in office, in time, imperceptibly lose sight of the people, and gradually fall into measures prejudicial to them." It's a shame they did not sign their name to the writing as I think we could label this view as fundamentally and absolutely correct. It's perhaps ironic that term limits were likely stripped from the articles not in good faith, but by those earliest 'special interests' who longed be the first professional politicians. The same interests that perhaps drove those stating truth-hoods to do so under the guise of anonymity.
And that problem is endemic to the whole system of professional politicking. Rather than focusing on 'the mission' politicians end up focusing on themselves and getting elected again. In an ideal democracy that would mean they have to work to appease the people. In reality, most of the electorate is grossly uninformed or misinformed. Generally all that matters when getting elected is money. And where does money come from? Not from the masses, it comes from special interests and top dollar donors. An issue only compounded, though not inherently caused, by the variety of ways to avoid any donation limitations such as messaging through 'independent' politician action committees.
Athens picked their Senators by lot, and we probably should consider it.
There are plenty of decent Americans but we also have too many that are juvenile, superficial, ignorant and aggressively incurious.
They don’t prevent people from becoming a “career politicians”, they just make it so that the career is less predictable or stable: new careerists are constantly being churned up from local politics and put into important committee chair jobs (etc.) where they have no relevant competence or experience, the top legislative leaders only last for a couple years, and the most experienced legislators get dumped out the top, often to become paid lobbyists. This encourages short-term legislation including bills mashed together that don’t make sense. Civility/comity is undermined, because legislators don’t need to keep working together years into the future.
To compensate legislators have to lean a lot more on their staff (who are the only people around with some clue about the context). The executive branch gains power at the expense of the legislature, because (a) executive officials are often more experience, (b) the executive can outlast an uncooperative legislative leadership by just waiting a couple years, (c) term-limited legislators have a more precarious career and might be looking for an appointment to a next job.
Father Time is undefeated.
It really does take experience, connections, networks, and skill to accomplish things in legislatures. Same with getting elected.
The problem is in order to become #2, you have to become #1.
Unless we as voters become far more informed and drastically change the way we evaluate candidates I don't think we'll get #2 skillsets from politicians who also don't have the qualities many term limit advocates despise.
Think evolution algorithm on a government scale.
Just for this, I am obligated to upvote.
Attend some public hearings. Watch how the experienced lobbyists and administrators run circles around legislators.
I now advocate for professional legislators (full time gig) with sufficient staff to tackle the size and complexity of modern governance.
How about instead of "professional legislators " you advocate the reduction of government both in size and complexity. that seems to be a better option IMO
Why are they necessary? How is claiming they are necessary not inherently impugning the concept of self-rule, how is it not inherently illiberal and arbitrary? What kind of base ideology are you subscribing to? Why shouldn't there be a career politician? What are examples of "actual skills" that you think should apply for proper legislating or executing or judging laws?
As someone who did study political science and law, I find term limits in law to be an abomination. A cheat. A long term destroyer of trust and institutional knowledge. You want actual skills, but you refuse to grant a person with such actual skills the position of a professional, with a career. It's an illogical position.
I doubt there is some Dunning-Kruger effect really going on with STEM folks and politics, although the blinders on approach I consistently see makes it superficially appear like that might be possible. Instead I think it's discomfort with the fact there are multiple ideologies, and you must choose, and it is that which will guide your future decision making on policy. Without the choise, you're vaporware. And without adversarialism, you're milquetoast. In both politics and law, the adversarial system is mandatory. I get way more suspicious when two ideological factions agree with each other from the outset on something than when they're adversarial and compelled to compromise. There is no compromise and there is no innovation without adversarialism.
I miss Feynman though. There was a guy with a very good balance between comfort not knowing, and discomfort not knowing. Lack of hubris, and yet no lack of ambition to learn.
Term limits do exist and are called elections. Every single election is a chance to vote someone out of office who hasn't done a good job. The thing that has essentially broken elections as term limits is partisan gerrymandering.
If we set 2 term limits, it would just mean that the corporate elite would just buy a new politician every 2 terms rather than buying a politician for 6 or more terms.
If you wanted to run for a political office. You'd need money. So who has money? And now you are beholden to the wealthy.
It's amazing when you think about it. We can no longer ever have a populist or independent president or congressman really. Because of the money needed to run for office.
Having a max age limit make more sense or remove the seniority rules used to appoint key committee chairs.
They key thing would be strict maximum $ limits for elections and give candidates free time on the tv networks.
If you kneecap politicians, which are somewhat more accountable to us voters, you empower administrators and lobbyists.
If you want more accountability, empower politicians, so they aren't so beholden to monied interests. Public financing of campaigns, for starters. Increase their staffing, so they can manage the work load. Etc.
Term limits is the last of your problems
I realize, that at least in some analysis, this did not happen in Michigan. (just reduction of lobbyist spending was 13%, but politicians with less experience consulted with them more -- See page 19 of [1] ).
However, I think the number of years in service, plus preliminary background requirements for staff members, plus other adjustments, still need to be made for a proper term-limit system.
Fundamentally, I believe, there are no small (defined as less than 1000), humans that should be permanently place in the position of distributing tax dollars, or military control.
These two things will produce corruption no matter how 'intellectually clean' a person is, entering the position.
US, UK and other countries claiming to be the 'moral compasses' for the world to follow, need to figure out how to switch from the class of politicians to the 'statesman' .
Whereas, I see a politician as somebody who makes is their job/career, vs statesman -- who view their work as a poorly (or insignificantly) compensated service for 8-12 years.
[1] http://www.msae.org/Portals/0/PDF/Term%20Limits%20White%20Pa...
I'd assert that things that need to change would have broad support, and that change would happen. Stuff without broad support, well, maybe that's not as important as we think it is.
i mean, sure. the American reinvestment act wouldn't have passed - and a bunch of the other stimulus packages. Of course, glass steagall wouldn't have been repealed in the first place.
I think if you want anything to be resistant to byzantine failure, it's making laws. shrug. They didn't ask me.
California used, until recently, to have such a supermajority requirement for the budget—not all legislation, just the one piece of legislation that is an annual must-pass.
It was the primary source of perennial budget crisis, and, it let a unified minority party that held it's unity (usually Republicans, because they usually were in the minority and almost always more unified in the state than Democrats) to dictate terms so long as they were more willing than the majority to hold the state hostage.
Plus, conversely, it also makes the majority party less accountable, because they can always blame the intransigence of the minority and the disastrous consequences of not reaching some deal for the actual contents of whatever deal is reached. A supermajority doesn't mean everyone owns the results, it means no one does.
Consensus would be nice in a less polarized, partisan context.
The primary driver for our partisanship is our winner-takes-all form of elections. Switching to approval voting for executive (one position) races and proportional representation of assemblies (house, councils) would dramatically reduce partisanship. Which would maybe then enable more consensus driven governance.
One can hope.
In setting a fixed term limit, we would risk weakening the check that the legislative represents against the executive.
Term limits don’t work.
The only “problem” solved would be that of occasionally having people that are even nominally accountable to the electorate who have the experience and skills in the system and the personal powerbase to standup to the permanent class of lobbyists and other unaccountable, interested experts.