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Comment by consultSKI | Hacker News Reader

Term Limits. No real math is required.

Senate: 1 Term. 6 years. Not able to then serve in the House. House: 2 Terms. 4 years. Not able to then serve in the Senate. 1 Term House + 1 Term Senate. 8 years total.

Elect any LEGAL Citizen regardless of age.

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Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.

Exactly this. California has enacted term limits and it hasn’t gone well.

Lobbyists run everything because the politicians are all too new. It also completely disincentivizes long-term thinking because the system guarantees they will be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost.

I heard an interview from a state rep in Florida complaining about term limits, something like "your first term is like your Freshman year, you don't know anything, your second is like your Sophomore year, etc" and her point was that you can't get anything done without being able to serve at least 6 years or so.

I think that's kind of bogus. If you can't figure out how to be an effective politician in your first term then you don't deserve to be elected for a second!

I heard AOC talk about this and it does make sense. There's just a lot to learn about how things actually get done and only so much time in the day. It's not as simple as "Write bill, pass bill, job done". You have to figure out who are the people who actually have power in an agency, what their priorities are, how to word the bills so they will actually achieve what you want, etc. There's a lot to it.

The podcast with AOC: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-power-broker-04-r...

The long term thinking is how to get into their longer term lobbying career.

Term limits make sense for POTUS. There should be regular changes in Executive management of any organization.

But not the Legislative or Judicial branch. Age limits (minimum and maximum) avoid the "lobbyist capture" issue.

>should be regular changes in Executive

yeah, so we can notkeep every international promise going forward?

I disagree with POTUS term limits. If the citizenry want someone to stay in office, like we did for FDR, we shouldn't be forced to pick someone else.

Furthermore, having term limits on just one branch of government decreases the power of that branch without decreasing the power of the other branches creating a new balance of power (or imbalance).

Imagine having to vote for someone other than FDR in the 1940 election. Germany had swallowed most of Europe that year. I couldn't imagine being forced to vote for President Wendell Willkie or James Farley to lead us into war because the guy I want can't serve due to term limits.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-inv...

He won that election by a landslide.

Roosevelt won the 1940 election with 55% of the popular vote, 38 of the 48 states, and almost 85% of the electoral vote.

Term limits are a dumb way to enforce change where there are definite benefits to institutional knowledge by the members, otherwise they are targets for capture by staffers and lobbyists.

Have a minimum (25 for House, 35 for Senate, POTUS, Judge) and maximum (75) age for all positions.

Term limits are actually bad for democracy. The most effective politicians are the ones who have learned how to do it over time. There's this bizarre American idea that being an elected official shouldn't be a job. It definitely should.

The problem here wouldn't even be solved by term limits, because Joe Biden has only been president for <4 years. The problem is that he has started to rapidly decline. Unless you institute some kind of Logan's Run Rule, you can't avoid elderly people in positions of power.

The actual, less fun solution, is for the party apparati to start elevating younger people to positions of power and influence. And that only happens if the members of that party start to demand it. It worked on Joe Biden, and he stepped aside.

Democracy is not there to be effective. It was meant to be a sociopath shredder, a wannabe kings and nobles grinder. But they reached critical mass and defanged the tax system, the most important containement vessel.

That's not true. Democracy is an end in and of itself, a system of government that at its best accurately reflects the will of the people. Preventing tyranny is a means to an end (preserving democracy) not the final goal.

And democracy is most certainly not a sociopath shredder. It runs on the power hungry. There are just supposed to be enough checks and balances to prevent any one person or minoritarian cabal from amassing too much power.

Defanged the tax system!?

The world's democratic governments tax and spend a greater % of GDP than ever before. The last time we were in this ballpark was in WW2.

The problem is, that's been tried and SCOTUS ruled it unconstitutional in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Term_Limits,_Inc._v._Thor... ), so a constitutional amendment would be needed. Good luck with that.

>Elect any LEGAL citizen regardless of age

I’m not sure why you feel the need to say “LEGAL citizen” and am kind of afraid to ask you to unpack it.

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