North Dakota voters just approved an age limit for congressional candidates
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the age limit for ND is 81. how many 81 year olds are fresh politicians?
In practice the legislatures do not sufficiently police the health of their members and remove them if they are in poor health and unfit to serve; and four to six years can be quite a long time for health issues to emerge.
But there are people that are plenty sharp well into their 80s, 90s. Benjamin Franklin was in office until he was 82. You look at someone like Warren Buffett as a more famous example of someone that is plenty sharp well into their 80s.
People age at different rates, and there's really no telling what sort of advances in medicine might improve this and extend life and healthspan by decades.
as a general rule, right now states have no constitutional authority to institute recall elections for federal offices like Congress, so the only way to delegate that kind of authority would be for the current Congress to vote that into existence.
Isn't the minimum age for presidential candidates 35? That actually seems weirder to me than an age maximum of 80.
A maximum age is dumb though. There really is no telling what developments in tech will lead to in terms of human lifespan.
I'm more concerned with people staying in politics for too long. Yes if someone entered Congress at 25 they should certainly be gone by 45, but if they started at 65 I see no reason to boot them out based on some arbitrary age restriction.
Are we each so important that we need to extend our life with technology, beyond the low-tech solutions of exercise, sleep, nutrition (can get enough exercise just meeting this need), warmth, purpose, and love?
What is the role of culture and generational bonds in all this?
This would be news to me, one way or the other that's inarguably unconstitutional.
The ND ban is nothing but ageism.
I honestly don't understand? Clearly the problem is incumbency, why are we going after age? It doesn't make much sense.
The law is clearly unconstitutional and would be overturned without a change to that document. And a change to that document won't happen.
But we can make laws to diminish the power of incumbency that would be in complete compliance with all constitutional parameters. I'm not even talking about the constitutionally questionable things like term limits. (Which, clearly, we could also try since people don't care about the constitutionality of the laws apparently.) I mean, why wouldn't we?
Why are we nibbling around the edges? Let's go for the jugular.
The real problem is gerrymandered districts that essentially mean it’s impossible to lose, even if you aren’t doing a good job.
And age is still a separate problem, there’s a different between a 40 year old wanting to serve 20 more years and a 70 year old doing the same.
No there isn't.
Both these people will put your society into a world of hurt. They want to serve 20 years. I can guarantee that ain't for the benefit of the poor and downtrodden, any more than the district they draw up for themselves to achieve their dream is for the benefit of its constituency.
The fix for that isn't age limits, it's term limits. Which would also help with many other issues that are caused by politics being a lucrative career.
None of that means the game actually accomplishes what government is supposed to accomplish. The actual result of the game is a huge bloated bureaucratic government that (a) does a poor job of what it is supposed to be doing, protecting everyone's basic rights, and (b) also does a poor job at all the other stuff that gets piled on top by legislators looking to make a mark and get re-elected and having to pander to special interests to do it.
As the saying goes: if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well.
Second, my response both implies that the game and the government are indistinguishable and that what it is supposed to accomplish is as much a question that comes with experience as is the knowledge of how to play.
The output of a system is always its purpose, which is an upscaled cognate to the maxim that there are no mistakes in politics. The key to overcoming cognitive dissonance is to understand that this may not align with your perception of that purpose nor your perceived interests. Such is Life.
The 2-term limit on presidents seemed to do great things, more limits on the congress is probably a good idea. There are 333 million people in the US, even if the candidates are drawn from the top 10,000 instead of the top 1,000 the results would be good in practice.
[0] Love him or hate him, symbolically the man isn't an endorsement of the status quo.
If you have rules that are not based in competency, but on a simple feeling you have that group of people X, are not competent to do job Y. That's just not going to go well for you. Age minimums as conceived by the founders, for instance, were based in competence. A desire for people to have experience. Even then, they were not draconian. As evidenced by the fact that someone 35 years old could be President of the US.
If you were arguing in favor of competency testing, people might get behind you. But you're arguing in favor of a blanket ban. Which is another matter entirely.
As far as I know voting record is reasonably available BUT bills are mostly not single issue and are very convoluted so that for any given bill it can be hard to tell whether you would have voted for or against.
Because they won't keep doing a good job. The longer a politician stays in office, the more they are corrupted. The only solution is to keep them from staying in office too long.
The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effective assembly members would end up forced to seek a "promotion" into the state senate if they wanted to stay in politics. This often meant challenging members of the same party. This ends with people constantly fighting their "allies" to scramble up the greased pole, rather than doing more useful work.
Of course, that can happen even without term limits (politicians are the ambitious sort) but they definitely accelerate the effect.
The worse problem is that all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists! Since they're now the only ones around with deep experience, they invariably get even more involved with crafting laws.
This actually dove-tails into the other problem with the lobbying industry: the revolving door from legislator to the lobbying firm. Even without term limits this happens all of the time. It's very common for a retiring US House member to immediately get a lucrative job lobbying their former colleagues. However in a term-limited legislative body this only gets worse. Not only do lobbyists become more powerful, but term limits provide a guaranteed flow of politicians needing a new job.
So, if you find yourself as a newly-elected politician in such a system and you actually want to make a difference, probably your best bet is to immediately find some lobbyists to get sweet with. They are the only ones with the experience to make the political machinery work, and they're probably your future employer as well.
So at least in my observation, the ultimate effect of term-limits is to transfer power from democratically elected representatives to well-funded special interests. By un-entrenching the politicians you're accidentally making another group even more entrenched.
By contrast, I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest. Imagine somebody who has been working on, say, education policy for decades. They know every policy detail, all of the stakeholders, all of the experts. In a world of term limits, how will such a person ever emerge?
All of the above is specifically about legislative term limits. I believe the case for executive term limits is much stronger.
That seems like a problem with the parties.
> all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists!
Sounds like a reason to outlaw lobbying.
> I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest.
They're not actual experts in the actual field. They're experts in working the system to favor partisans of the field. Not the same thing.
An actual expert in an actual non-political field would be doing productive work in that field. The real root problem is that we expect politicians to be "experts" in anything other than making sure the government does the limited things it's supposed to do, and nothing else--we want to use the government as a tool to solve whatever problems we see, instead of as an umpire whose sole job should be protecting everyone's basic rights and stopping there.
If they did, Biden and Trump would both not be candidates.
The present ages of all of the candidates who won delegates in the 2020 democratic primaries: 82, 82, 81, 74, 41
I didn't want to vote for Pete Buttigieg.
Amy Klobuchar wouldn't have been my choice for a candidate but was the nearest to someone I'd actually want to vote for and she dropped out after the third state.
So yeah the Democratic party can go to hell. Donald Trump was their doing because they/Hillary pushed everyone off the ticket years ago and they haven't fielded a desirable candidate since Obama, and he was, all things considered, mediocre.
These days the bar for a politician to get my vote is to still have a child in university (or younger) and to not literally be a Nazi. It is disturbingly difficult to find someone to vote for.
If this was for president, Biden would be ineligible, but Trump would be eligible.
what if in a century most people lived to 150?
This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”
A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…
As for the future when people might live longer…
again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…
why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.
And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.
CEOs of large companies really run the US, people working for them tend to write the laws plus they really decide who gets to run via contributions. Most people would call them contributions, but Citizens United changed that.
Benjiman Franklin was strongly vociferous on the constituition being barely sufficient until a despot showed up and trashed it.
Might be time for a rethink and reset of the election methods, terms, supreme court lifetime appointments, corporations as citizens, allowing lobbying, actually imprisoning | significantly firing corruption in politics, stronger seperation of arms of government, etc.
The US has been going strong for nearly 250 years with the same form of government. Who has gone longer? (Leaving out a few microstates and such). Ben Franklin was wrong.
Which isn’t to say we don’t need some change. To be honest most of what we need is better candidates and people more interested in subtlety and honest disagreements.
The US is close to that already without having to change from its rut.
> To be honest most of what we need is better candidates and people more interested in subtlety and honest disagreements.
Agreed.
However it's baked into the antiquated US system to devolve into two party system that doesn't represent the people at large and are essentially two sides of the same coin (or at least until recently when the circuit breaker has been a lurch toward despotism).
Ironic given the founders mostly didn't even like party politics, but that's the inevitable grind of iterated discrete dynamic systems for you.
Older isn't better just by virtue of age, the US got some good ideas from the French and the native american people and then stagnated, meanwhile the UK continued to evolve, countries like Australia adopted "Washminster" system that built on the strengths of two prior systems, etc.
There are systemic reasons why the US has such a limited choice for President, it's a problem that who leads as #1 is even a big deal, it's just a little king for four years which was the problem with George back in the day.
Maybe tomorrow some state decides that freedom of religion is bad?
And 80 is too high, but it is a good test legally. If you can retire and collect money for being old, then you are simply not generationally relevant anymore in terms of your political landscape. Almost by definition when you think about it that way. 60 or 65 should be the cap. Perhaps even to vote… It has nothing to do with technology and lifespan. It has to do with cultural relevance. Sure, our society should foster wise elders who hold respected opinions gained from years of experience, but to be ruled by them is to subject your prime years as an adult to the stolid ideals of a past generation.
Do I trust people like Trump or Biden to sensibly navigate a complex social landscape with gender fluidity, cyber personas, changing approaches to marriage, digital privacy concerns, digital identity, or even to understand the everyday stress and pressures of the generation producing the nation’s capital and the nations offspring? Heck no. Even if they read up on the topic and can respond to talking points or have formed their own opinions, _they didn't live them,_ it’s not the life of their generation and they simply cannot have true empathy for any such concerns. I would be more comfortable electing someone I disagreed with on almost every political topic to office, from my generation, than some impedance mismatched person twice my age who appears to align more naturally with my beliefs. Why? Because I know if it comes down to it, when stakes are high and it really matters, when that person has to make a decision that will have great impact, they will be equip with the tools, thoughts, experiences, etc. to navigate the decision in a way that’s socially relevant, even if I disagree with the outcome.
I say all this understanding that the time will come for my generation to relinquish power (if we ever get it) and shepherd in the next, likely before the power structures we’ve created would prefer it. The problem today is we’re still subjects of our grandparents power structures. And it is so hard not to become apathetic to our entire system when it’s so ingrained and inaccessible.
In short, if we want to see younger leader perhaps we should stop canceling people left and right over small human blunders or evolving opinions and be more forgiving and tolerant as a society.
Although again, the SCOTUS decision was very close (5-4) so we can’t say they would rule the same way again.
1. Term limits are how to avoid career politicians.
2. Numerical age is unimportant compared to the health and fitness of an individual, and the agility of their mind. This throws away perfectly competent and capable candidates with explicit ageism.
Care to explain? I can make assumptions but I will probably not have the same interpretation you have.
I mean, I'm in my 50s and I'd be out in the streets throwing down with the cops if they took away the right to vote from a significant portion of the population.
At 18 most people have too much going on (high school graduation coming up, studying for and applying to college and/or looking into employment, potentially seeking housing if their parents are kicking them out, etc) to have much capacity for political participation. That picture is significantly different just a couple of years earlier, where time and mental bandwidth is generally at more of a surplus, and so if people became capable of voting at that age it stands to reason that more would take advantage of it (and continue to after that).
Denying the vote to a thoughtful 16 year old is worse than giving the vote to a 29 year old that takes it for granted. And then same thing applies to a 2 year old, if they can independently mark the ballot...