Some voters, though, think we should have clearer rules about when a politician is too old to serve. Sixty-seven percent of respondents strongly or somewhat supported an age limit for serving in the Senate in a YouGov/UMass Amherst poll from June, and 58 percent of adults thought age limits for serving as president would be a good idea in a Marist poll from last November. Sixty-eight percent of respondents favored mental competency tests for candidates over 75 in a YouGov/Yahoo survey from February. A plurality, 48 percent, think the job of president is too demanding for someone over 75, according to a CBS/YouGov poll from June. And overall, Americans’ preference for younger leadership is clear: About half of Americans think the ideal age for a president is someone in their 50s, according to the Pew Research Center.
Age limits good, term limits better.
Term limits just ensure the incumbent doesn’t care about their last term. If they do a good job and the incoming candidates look lousy, they should be allowed to continue. Want to really make a difference? Get money out of politics. Big corporate donations and mega media are what drives the campaigns, including who gets on the ballot in the first place, not the voters.
Direct democracy with real-time vote retraction, even better.
If an incumbent doesn’t care about their last term, get them out, now. Can’t take money completely out of politics, but can reduce its weight significantly.
The flip side is good politicians that don’t need to care about reelection can do the right thing instead of the thing that would be most likely to get them elected.
Term limits doesn’t have to be 2 terms. We also don’t want all our politicians to lack experience. We have a minimum age limit. We could also have a max.
I think term limits really depends. I get why it makes sense in the abstract and I would love to see it implemented but I’ve stopped really advocating for it as a long term fix. It just moves the “institutional knowledge” about how Congress works into the hands of lobbyists instead of Congress. The revolving door just gets worse. It would have to be something like term limits + campaign finance reform to make a meaningful impact. That’s a noble goal but we’ve needed campaign finance reform for a while and no one seems to want to address it.
Age limits seems to be a good balance of making an individual Congress critter’s term long enough to still have some sway/power/authority (instead of lobbyists) while making sure they don’t blue screen on us during a press conference. Given such high profile issues with McConnell and Feinstein I’ll be a little optimistic in hoping for some change.
