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North Dakota voters just approved an age limit for congressional candidates
- m3kw9 2y agoGonna be reversed when AI extends life beyond 200 years.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoThis is so weird, because you could also just not elect them.
- bigyikes 2y agoDo you also find the two term limit for presidents weird then?
- HPsquared 2y agoIt is, a little.
- tyleo 2y agoNot a completely fair comparison IMO because the first term is an advantage when running for the second.
- bobthepanda 2y agoall, if not nearly all, of the old people that this is aimed at would be career politicians for which many of the same rules apply. the age limit for ND is 81. how many 81 year olds are fresh politicians?
- chrisco255 2y agoDoesn't matter if it's rare, it's a bad law if it restricts people arbitrarily. Just do term limits.
- bobthepanda 2y agoIt’s a mix of issues with both incumbency and health episodes that come with old age. 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.
- chrisco255 2y agoIt's not the legislature's job to do so. It's the people's job to do so. The House has 2 year terms and the Senate has 6 year terms. 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.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThe problem is that you can be perfectly healthy in year 1 and have severe cognitive decline by year 3, and voters can't really do anything about that. 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.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoIt’s meant to prevent the emergence of an autocrat. That doesn’t apply to a member of Congress for obvious reasons.
- banish-m4 2y agoTerm limits are excellent because they avoid career politicians getting too comfortable and corrupt. It has nothing to do with age.
- Jensson 2y agoYet one of the most corrupt first world democracies has them while most of the much less corrupt democracies doesn't have it. Maybe it is needed due to corruption, but it doesn't seem to be necessary.
- vsuperpower2020 2y agoPeople can't really be trusted to make good decisions, so the current idea of democracy seems to be to at least remove some bad decisions.
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- 3vidence 2y agoWe have age minimums for just about everything it doesn't seem crazy to have age maximum for things for mainly the same reasons. Isn't the minimum age for presidential candidates 35? That actually seems weirder to me than an age maximum of 80.
- epoxia 2y agoThere is already precedent of careers in aviation having required retirement ages. In areas with high stakes, it is not unreasonable to have age limits.
- chrisco255 2y agoThat's not really weird at all. It's enough time to gain some experience and wisdom in the world before being endowed as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on earth. 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.
- meristohm 2y agoIs it okay to die? 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?
- toomuchtodo 2y agoIt’s not just okay, it is necessary. Otherwise, old ideas won’t die and give room for new ideas to grow, like a forest burning so that the saplings can get sun.
- p1esk 2y agoSo don’t vote for young candidates then? Why do you need these limits?
- TrainedMonkey 2y agoThe issue is not electing people... it's re-election advantage. Incumbent candidates rarely lose, especially in Congress... and power is addicting. This leads to the current situation where U.S. Congress median age is pretty far on the cognitive decline curve - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-gets-younger-senate-gets-older-a-look-at-the-age-and-generation-of-lawmakers-in-the-118th-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... . I think there were multiple issues that took down USSR, but aging leadership with inflexible thinking that was not capable of keeping up with times was probably complicit in most of them.
- lstodd 2y agowell maybe work on that "re-election advantage", understand and curtail it instead of instuting blanket (and imo insane) bans?
- dcow 2y agoIf you’re old enough to retire and collect old person benefits you are no longer fit to lead not because you are might be incapable but because you are simply not generationally relevant. The office of president has term limits for effectively the same reason and nobody calls those insane.
- TedDoesntTalk 2y agoTerm limits on the presidency have nothing to do with age. You could be 35, serve two terms, and you’d still be banned from being president again … at age 43. The ND ban is nothing but ageism.
- dcow 2y agoIt’s not. Nobody is saying old people are subhuman scum who shouldn’t be treated kindly and with respect. The argument is that after a certain point you may not have a lived experience that is relevant anymore for being an effective political leader. The same way we wouldn’t put two 80 year olds in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft… the risk there is obvious and clear.
- mycologos 2y agoCould you? Some elections only feature old candidates. This limit is a way of making sure there is at least one non-old choice.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThere’s always the primary
- dheera 2y agoThe problem is real voters don't really determine who to elect. If they did, Biden and Trump would both not be candidates.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThey were selected in primaries. Who did that selection if not “real voters”?
- dheera 2y agoI don't know a single person who wanted Biden as the democrat candidate. He only won because the other dudes on the ballot are some nobodys that nobody knows. Do you even know who they are without looking? It's almost like it's rigged from the inside with some nobodys just so that Biden wins.
- Larrikin 2y agoAn anecdote is not evidence, neither is the failure of you and your friends to research people in the primary evidence of a grand conspiracy. Complaining about Biden specifically in an incumbent year really feels like a bad faith argument.
- rayiner 2y agoBiden and Trump are probably the worst examples for the point you’re trying to make. There’s no Democrat that polls better against Trump than Biden. Biden beat Kamala Harris (who had Obama’s team behind her), Elizabeth Warren (the choice of affluent white professionals), and Bernie Sanders (the choice of progressives) because he had the support of the party’s critical black voters and moderate/conservative faction. Trump, meanwhile, was the choice of populist republicans who overthrew the party’s establishment (Bush/McCain/Romney) wing.
- carabiner 2y agoHard when he has 100x more money than the younger guy.
- colechristensen 2y agoThe parties manipulate who runs in the primaries. Voters regularly just don't have the choices. 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.
- dcow 2y agoYep. I would vote for a yellow haired keyboard warrior or a bible fearing evangelical regardless of whether I share a single political belief so long as they’re participating in the society I actually exist in. 80 year olds don’t live in the same world.
- techdragon 2y agoGood. The world can’t afford to be run by gerontocracy…
- m463 2y agoJust wondering... If this was for president, Biden would be ineligible, but Trump would be eligible. what if in a century most people lived to 150?
- techdragon 2y agoGiven how many people are struggling to find enthusiasm to voice support for Biden due to the situation in Gaza and how he isn’t trying to play hardball with Netanyahu in comparison to the hardball Reagan played back in the day… there is a lot of negative sentiment for Biden due to his age and intransigence on many issues… from the outside looking in (I’m in Australia, so I don’t have a vote in this, I just care about the foreign policy implications) … the situation in the upcoming election is very much looking like a lot of people view it as “narcissistic nut job who seems extremely keen on fascism” and “old politician who might be getting just a little bit senile from time to time… but is also not doing enough to try and stop a genocide” … oh and and throwing your vote out for a third party candidate who literally had brain worms 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.
- Reptur 2y ago81 is still too high. Should make it a max of 60.
- jmclnx 2y agoActually I would go with 70 unless people working in industry (CEOs) is forced to retire at 60. 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.
- boredpeter 2y agoWhy can a lower limit on age to participate in elections be constitutional but an upper limit not? You need to be 18 to vote and 35 to be president but we can’t legislate an upper age limit on running for office?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIt’s because of the constitution. The most fundamental laws of the land are expressed in the constitution, and nothing else can override them. In the US, the 26th amendment establishes the minimum age of 18 for voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_to_the_...) and Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the constitution establishes the age of 35 for presidency. However, a constitutional amendment (which is difficult to pass with today’s political divide) could theoretically change that.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoI thinks a federal law could set a maximum age. Just a state law cannot. Although again, the SCOTUS decision was very close (5-4) so we can’t say they would rule the same way again.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TheAdamist 2y agoWelfare for lawyers, with as blatantly unconstitutional as this is.
- Animats 2y ago"No one over 60 should take this job" - Dwight Eisenhower, age 61 at his first inauguration.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoPersonally I think it’s more important to increase the voting age than to prevent elderly candidates. Democracy is only as good as the participants. And the human brain does not mature until closer to 30. That’s also when people have gone through more of life’s big steps and can have better perspective on the world to make better decisions. I simply don’t understand the push from some to lower the age, as it will result in worse decisions in our system. The only reason I can see for lowering the age is to favor one side or the other at that time.
- oatmeal_croc 2y agoUnfortunately for you, the vast majority of people who riot are between 18 to 30. And they'd be right to riot.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago> And they'd be right to riot. Care to explain? I can make assumptions but I will probably not have the same interpretation you have.
- UncleEntity 2y agoI think they're making the false assumption that only the effected parties would be out protesting. 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.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoDon’t most people under 30 not vote anyway? I don’t see how this would matter much in practice
- jwells89 2y agoThere may be an argument that reducing the voting age could result in more politically engaged under-30s (and eventually, over-30s). 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).
- spoonjim 2y agoPointless law as the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot add qualifications for national office beyond those in the Constitution.
- carabiner 2y agoWhat if the Constitution might be bad?
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThen it still doesn’t mean that this law is a way to change it
- colechristensen 2y agoThere are several mechanisms to amend it.
- defrost 2y agoAmend? 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.
- colechristensen 2y agoAll that sounds like a great opportunity for a movement to get usurped by a dictator. That many huge changes all at once. 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.
- dcow 2y agoInterestingly, anecdotally, the idea of an age cap for our politicians has been a thread I’ve seen both sides of the aisle share sentiments and easily agree on in casual political conversation more and more lately. I am cautiously optimistic that this may be a conduit towards the non-bloody version of the future where we don’t go to civil war and instead decide to do a little foundation repair on our political system. Age/term limits and voting reform. 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.
- mgarfias 2y agoThis is the way
- dcow 2y agoIgnoring all the actual structural (wealth & power) problems we have that play into our inability to find strong leaders aged appropriately, I sometimes wonder if this isn’t a courage problem. Trump and Biden have nothing to lose. It doesn't take courage and backbone to play those scapegoat roles, because nothing they do to their image or reputation matters. It takes true courage for a 40 year old with half a life ahead of them to stand up and advocate for what they believe in, knowing they’ll e.g. face ridiculous death threats, and may well be ostracized by formerly close friends and/or communities once their hand is known. Most people are not willing to take that risk, and I’m not sure a good leader with a family should be expected to. The reason freedom of expression is sacrosanct is because it enables people to stake their reputation in a way that doesn’t risk being canceled. So they can go back to life as it were if their platform doesn't take off. 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.
- deepfriedchokes 2y agoThey should have set the age at 65.
- banish-m4 2y agoThis fails to address 2 concerns: 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.