Comment by pwthornton
1 day ago
Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.
Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.
Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.
Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.
Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.
I don't really see why age limits would be exempt for "voters need to take responsibility for their voting".
IMO, the real issue is that voters are coerced to accept candidates put up by the parties due to FPTP. The threat of the wrong side winning gets people to accept someone they don't want. The primary process does not need to be democratic, and the results are pressured by the future threat of losing to the other side in a head-to-head.
This is true: in general the best fix for US democratic systems is to learn from more functional systems from overseas.
US is running on beta version democracy; it was wonderful for a trial run and we learned a lot from it, but unfortunately the country has been stuck without upgrades for a while. It'd be like trying to connect a Xerox PARC desktop to the modern internet.
Obviously it's absurdly nontrivial to shift it at this point but I do agree that age and term limits both seem to be stopgap solutions due to the challenge of implementing more effective strategies.
Consider Australia: of 226 parliamentarians, there's one aged 75+: Bob Katter.
I'd say there's three features of the au system that keep us relatively free of the absurd incumbency advantages in USA:
1. Compulsory voting makes it harder to solicit votes from a subset of the populace.
2. The Australian Electoral Commission is highly trusted as a neutral body, so Gerrymandering is rare.
3. None of our voting systems use First Past The Post; it's all ranked choice, babes!
> Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
That is one aspect, but not the important one. The most important element is anti-corruption. Legal bodies can always entrench themselves and their own interests. Term limits significantly weakens entrenchment...excepting when the same legal bodies inevitably gut it.
You're saying that term limits reduce corruption?
That's in fact not at all what the research says. There's a decent amount of research that suggests that they actually increase corruption. There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
This is a classic one of those ideas that many people intuitively "feel" makes sense but is actually just terrible policy.
> That's in fact not at all what the research says.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
There are a lot of factors beyond term limits that influence this kind of research. The most important detail is to remember that corruption spans more than external influence. Institutional ossification has benefits and drawbacks. The drawbacks have outweighed the benefits, historically in the US and England. It was literally baked into the US Constitution to ensure this would not repeat for the US head of state. Notably the Supreme Court was baked in as a lifetime appointment. Granted, the remaining political bodies have not followed suit, I think it's clear that this has had a negative consequence due to the aforementioned entrenchment of the political parties.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
It is incorrect to claim that is the only effect. I also don't believe that the conclusion is correct. I do believe it's closer to your initial statement.
> it's just a way for [legislators] to not take responsibility for their voting.
ie It shows a lack of care in executing the responsibilities of the elected position, which is why they barely do anything but campaign at the federal level.
It seems logical to me that a term limit could increase vulnerability to corruption in your last term. If you can't be re-elected, there is less incentive to be loyal to the people you represent.
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