Definitely. Age limits are difficult. Some people lose it early. Some never do.
Two terms and you're out seems to me to mostly resolve this.
You can even make it just two consecutive terms. I think I'm largely fine with that. At least it's better than the alternative.
Also, lifetime appointment. That was designed at a different time. Scotus should be a (reasonably long) single term. Then you're done with the federal judicial system.
Yes! Term limits are the answer, not age limits. It’s effectively the same thing but protects us in two ways (instead of just one: ie age) and does so without the slippery slope that an age limit would entail.
If a pilot is forced to retire at 65 due to fear of killing a couple hundred, there is absolutely zero reason someone in charge near 400 million shouldn't have a maximum age cap
He means that people have different rates of cognitive decline than others, so if you like this 70 year old politician and he's great, why not?
I think that's ridiculous. Term AND age limits would make much brighter futures. We should be electing officials that will have to live under the shade of the trees they planted, which is not the case for most US politicians today.
Yeah the slippery slope makes no sense. I get that there isn't a precise date to determine the start of cognitive decline, but why not just put an avery one as a limit in the law then? We do it for expiration dates as well.
If there were age limits it should be well below the point of any cognitive decline, because it's also about having younger people in power who can think and plan on a scale of several decades, because that's how long they have left to live.
The problem with setting the age limit too low is that people of that age range might not feel represented.
To give an example, I'm 48. One of my upcoming concerns is retirement. Will it be able to afford to retire? Will I need to work part time after "retiring" just to survive?
If every politician in a position of power was too young, retirement might not seem to them to be an important issue. After all, when you're 30, retirement seems forever away. They could enact policies that are great for people under 40 but devastating to people approaching retirement.
That's why, while I definitely think politicians like McConnell and Feinstein should have retired long ago, I'm leery about setting too low of a forced retirement age.
The door wouldn't be rotating anymore than it is now.
And what's your source on young people not helping anything? All the times in US history that we made the most progress were under young Democrat presidents.
I didn't say young people don't help anything. I said having only new young people all the time doesn't help. Having people with experience is a good thing.
Considering a lower age limit would have to be put in place by existing politicians, that particular slope is not slippery at all. And slippery-slope arguments are categorically invalid except when you can point to a specific reason why doing something will make it likely to be done in excess.
I think the idea in the Senate is that those people would have been seasoned bureaucrats who were intimately familiar with law - lawyers in particular. The House was more the everyday man representing the people of his district.
Now that we vote for senators, too, I'm not sure what role they really play. I'd also add that we need to remove the cap on headcount in the house. I did the napkin math once and we should have something like 2.5x the representatives we have now, IIRC.
You don't understand why the people who vote on various things won't vote against themselves?? I'm guessing it's the same reason why voting on pay raises for themselves always pass.
The only votes congress has taken regarding their own pay is voting to deny a raise. Every year Congress is set to get an automatic COLA raise, u less they refuse it via vote it automatically kicks in. Those are the votes congress has been conducting. They have voted in pay raises for congressional staff members.