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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

My problem with term limits is being a politician is a job like any other. You get a performance review every few years. But by the time you get really good at the job you're forced to quit.

If there are age minimums for these federal offices there should be age maximums.

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I think being too “good at the job” is part of what people are worried about for politicians.

Yes there are skills to be learned to be effective in such a system, but being too entrenched in it can lead to forming relationships that overshadow the relationship with their constituents.

What we've seen is term limits just result in the "party machine" really running the seat, as the warm body is replaced time and time again.

Term limits are effective against populists, for whatever that's worth.

Term limits definitely come with very real tradeoffs. I'd argue, though, that if the machine is that corrupt it doesn't matter what we do with politicians.

What you're describing sounds to me like the politicians are inconsequential puppets and the machine must be limited or removed. I could a tuallg get behind that idea, it wouldn't take much to convince me that term limits don't go after the real problem.

Maybe we should consider a less violent version of what Thomas Jefferson wanted and just replace the entire government, top to bottom, every 20 years. On top of any other term limits or whatever - just periodically reset everything for the current generation.

Maybe that would even include a Constitutional convention. I've long been of the opinion that we should be updating the Constitution more often, and more easily. It isn't intended to be frozen in amber.

I'm definitely a fan of the general sentiment. Exactly how that is done to keep enough stability to avoid constant churn would be a really interesting debate, but I've long thought that laws should be required to come with expiration dates that have to be renewed.

Personally, I'd also be so interested to see what the political response would be today if a group of well known and respected individuals scheduled a constitutional convention to honestly hold such discussions. It's exactly what we did to being the process of breaking away from the king, I wonder if they would get shut down somehow?

My general lean is toward subsidiarity - decisions should be made at the lowest possible level.

This is somewhat inefficient but it also minimizes major problems.

I'd argue that gridlock is a feature not a bug. Hamilton even said as much in the Federalist papers when acknowledging that the model of a three-branch government can be slow and inefficient compared to a one or two branch model.

I think this gets a bit further down the road than my original goal of a quick solution that could be implemented now for some benefit, but yeah I'd love to see power pushed as far down the hierarchy as possible.

I don't think it's fair to assume that votes are representative of performance. Politics are a popularity contest first and unfortunately that means image is more important than actions.

Are term limits more representative of performance than votes?

I'd say term limits are an unfortunate tradeoff that might be helpful when votes and performance diverge too far.

If the machine itself is broken, any changes or limitations to the output (the politicians here) are just bandaids. I do actually think we should fix the underlying problem, but hopefully term limits could buy us some time and start to remove power from those who gained so much by the system that needs fixing.

I'm not totally opposed to max age limits, that has tradeoffs just like term limits would.

Theres no magic bullet unfortunately. Any line in the sand will have people caught in the crossfire, whether that's a person over the age limit that would make an excellent representative or a person who is blocked from a third term that actually isn't corrupted by the machine of political favor, lobbyists, etc.

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