This is so weird, because you could also just not elect them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ND ban is nothing but ageism.
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.
This would be news to me, one way or the other that's inarguably unconstitutional.
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?
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.
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.