Why does a U.S. presidential candidate need to be 35 years old? (2016)
constitutioncenter.org
constitutioncenter.org
If we could just get approval voting implemented universally, maybe we wouldn't need an enforced upper limit.
"No person may be inaugurated as President if they are 70 years or older on the day of the election"
Neither party or area of the country would be impacted any more than any other, so there's no partisan angle. Just a few older politicians would be excluded.
We have primaries and qualifications for getting on the ballot, and while one might quibble about the exact details, I don't think most people would be happy if we somehow collectively elected a 10-year-old, or a goat, as President of the United States of America.
An old person doesn't have to care about a future career once out of office and can ignore bribes. (Yeah yeah reality might prove differently)
Presumably there are advantages there too. Perhaps harder to bribe or threaten someone older (they don’t care as much?)
Ron DeSantis is 44 years old, quite close to that line. He is likely to be candidate for your presidency one of these years. You may not like him - or maybe you do - but he seems to be quite viable. If your former president does not get in the way he is likely to be the candidate for the Republican party and with that the next president of the USA given the dearth of viable candidates on "the other side".
It would be very hard to consistently pass an office from parent to child when the officer holder has to be at least 35.
Especially since there was already a de facto requirement the office holder be male, excluding older daughters.
Are you talking pre-US monarchies? If so did you mean to say not be female?
I didn’t mean monarchies per se. Plenty of things were passed father to son: titles, property, reputation.
That’s not exactly reliable succession.
Personally I wouldn't be so strict and let run anyone adult in productive age from 18-68 to avoid having there people with dementia like certain democratic president.
What I would make another condition for all politicians is they must work at least few years in private sector before running for office, I don't really like we are often governed by people who "worked" whole life in comfort and safety net of their gov funded job with no risks and productivity requirements detached from experience of majority population. They should also pass basic test how much cost milk, bread, etc. and how to deal with daily scenarios.
Feels related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox . Yeah, you can say there's not a big difference between 34 and 35. And you can say there's not a big difference between 33 and 34. And so on.
Stop trying to discern the hidden wisdom. There isn't any.
One point of comparison might be France, which is currently on its fifth attempt at a republic (with intervening reigns of terror, emperors, restored kings, anarchies, and Nazi collaborationist regimes), while we're still on our first one (or second, if you want to count the Articles of Confederation). Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. have all had multiple attempts as well.
Most founding documents seem to be more focused on maintaing the rights of the rich from the start (i.e. no free speech or protesting allowed), the US seemed to focus on it's citizens more.
Maybe the American survived for so long as for one it changed quite a bit over time, via amendments and via interpretation.
And mind: America had a civil war ... but then found a way to reunite under the constitution (with three amendments) that could also have torn it apart easily.
Flowery language about the people and claims about rights are common even amongst states which are - in practice - the worst oligarchies or dictatorships, and I can't think of any democratic constitutions containing as an egregious a provision in favour of the rich as the Three Fifths Compromise. (In fairness to the US Constitution, claims about inalienable rights were relative novelty at the time, and a lot of the flowery language and claims about rights in other countries' constitutions are borrowed from it and its Enlightenment inspirations)
The one feature of its design which has helped it persist is that it's quite heavily weighted against change (federal structure, separation of powers, supermajorities for amendments) but in some contexts that looks more like a bug than a feature. But overall I'd say its continuity is primarily the result of simple fact the US has existed for longer and under less external pressure than most states than anything particularly outstanding about the text or polity design. That and the Confederacy losing. The quasi-Biblical reverence most Americans treat it with doesn't hurt either, but then some of us Brits get misty eyed at the thought of the Magna Carta, and that's a load of waffle about Cinque Ports and Earls' heirs!
Ah yes, yet another person who presumes to pontificate on the Three Fifths Clause without actually having thought about the actual consequences.
The clause reduced slave states' power.
Gosh, it would have been nice if the US had never had legal slavery. Thank you for that keen insight.
>or not counting slaves towards the level of representation their masters got in Congress at all
As you yourself said it was a compromise, between what the free and slave states wanted. Just like everything else in the Constitution, such as the Electoral College being a compromise between the large and small states. Such compromises made the Constitution possible, which in turn made possible the Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War amendments that ended said legal slavery.
The larger point is that the clause was not the means by which slaveholders wrote into the Constitution what their view of the value of a slave's life was, again because the clause reduced their political power.
Of course it was a compromise and sometimes compromise renders evils necessary, but codifying the existence of slaves into the constitution obviously made the high ideals spoken of in the preamble look more than a little insincere, and the three fifths clause explicitly granted power to the slaveholders over the more sensible alternative weighting system for Congressional Representatives (number of voters/adults/free people) campaigned for by abolitionists at the time. If we're comparing the US Constitution to other constitutions written under their own unique pressures, its a clear case of the US Constitution not being drafted with more commitment to equality under the law.
The fact that it was ultimately rectified after a war which killed 1 in 50 Americans isn't a particularly strong argument in favour of it being an effective compromise either.
American's today hold up the US Constitution as some kind of divine and immutable document. They treat it like The Bible, where all the "bad" or ambiguous parts are just kind of forgotten about or supposed to be interpreted a certain way. I mean, the 3/5ths compromise is literally in Article 1. That's how important institutionalized racism was.
"… a horrible mess of weird ideas and compromise and intentional ambiguity," actually describes the US Constitution quite marvelously IMO. It's purpose was to unite a group of states that had no unity and no singular identity. The binding force was a common enemy.
People read into all this mystical nonsense about what the "Founding Fathers" would think about this, that, or the other thing as if they had some kind of divine wisdom. No one was really thinking that far ahead. A quarter of them were willing to sign anything that let them keep their slaves.
It's just a document with a few good ideas. That's it. That's all it is.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
> That said, what constitution do you consider to be better written than the US?
I think the usual poli-sci answer would be "there's a reason most new democracies—including the ones the US sets up—tend to model the Westminster system rather than the US". Even US officials helping nascent democracies generally don't try to push anything like our constitution on them, because it's widely regarded as pretty bad.
Instead it is mostly used to pass unrepeatable laws. The only big changes to the constitution were allowing federal taxes on the general population and making the Senate semi democratic.
And even the other amendments are the same format: ambiguous and very open to interpretation.
Take the bill of rights. Nothing there specifically changes how the constitution works. It just adds some laws about what congress can or can't do. And it does so in very broad strokes.
"The right to bear arms" has been litigated and re-litigated 1000 times and seems to be almost entirely down to the preferences of the day. It's been left up to judges to decide what parts to ignore entirely (the militia bit) and what it applies to (no surface air missiles or fireworks, rifles are ok). Yet everyone acts like the 2nd amendment is settled and either has to be accepted as it is today or repealed entirely.
I don't know who has a better constitution. I just find it really weird that Americans think so highly of their one despite it breaking or failing all the time. Don't get me wrong, we all have our national blink spots. :)
You also need to let go of the nihilism which lies behind what you just stated, a statement easily disproven by ~250 years of history. It is very easy to pick out the warts in that history from the comfortable environment created in part due to it, far harder to set out a course to create that history and make it last for so long.
and I oop
Once you agree on the premise, it’s only a matter of asking what the limit ought to be, and while there may be some theoretical value to that discussion, it seems the average voter in practice is at most ambivalent about candidate age, and I definitely don’t think it’s a given that were the limit ever changed, that the number would be lowered, rather than increased.
By way of example, people in the last decade seem to currently have a preference towards significantly older candidates. Biden took office as this nation’s oldest president at 78 [1], and Trump was our nation’s second oldest president at 70. [1]. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s largest competitor for delegates in the 2016 primary, would have been 75 had he been nominated. [2]
America, for better or worse, seems to like old people.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Un...
[2] September 8, 1941 birthdate; +75 gets to 2016
Wouldn't they just... not elect them, then?
Celebrities have been elected quite a few times, and presumably at least some of those votes came from people who assumed the celebrity in question wasn't going to win, and so there was no risk in their vote.