politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
I think one of America's biggest fuckups was designing a system where elections can only be every four years
Because back then, the fastest way to get a message from a to b was to send a guy with a 🐎.
Just add the way Athens dealt with this thousands of years ago. You vote twice for each representative: once to get him into office, and a second time at the end of the term to determine if he can stay or gets banished from the city.
Banishment should be making them live in Bakersfield. Nobody deserves such a wretched fate, deserved for a politician thought.
No.
The correct answer is Gary, Indiana.
God dammit Jerry
Some of them could be deported to Russia. They are doing Putins work, so he should pay their pensions.
For the presidency.
House terms are 2 years, and Senators are 6 years.
Lack of term limits fir Supreme Court judges was another big fuckup
Even the system of checks and balances were kind of a fuckup if you think about it - the whole system just presumes that most people are acting in good faith and bad faith actors are limited to a few positions or a single branch.
The system wasn't supposed to be perfect or eternal. The founders explicitly said that they expected each successive generation to essentially rewrite the constitution. It's not their fault that we only made minor tweaks over 250 years.
The threshold for passing reform is too damn high. There should've been some mandatory period to make the change happen more often and easily to keep with the times. Now we're stuck with an antiquated system that still mentions slavery in its founding documents and its loopholes are so well known that someone's using it to turn this country into an autocracy.
I don't know that the threshold is the problem. I think the problem is that about 35% of humans are complete pieces of shit. I don't know how you account for that effectively. Expecting the rest of society to counter them seems about as reasonable of a solution as you're likely to find and that's essentially what we have now.
Why do you think that's not universal?
Shoulda made the revamp of the constitution an enforced, time-boxed process then. Currently the approximate timeframe of getting an amendment through is what, 60 years or so?
Correct. They cannot be separate powers but coequal without the ability of enforcement. If the military is all subordinate to the president, and Congress or SCOTUS don’t have resources to enforce their oversight of the others, then they are not coequal. They are coequal in theory, never in practice.
It actually assumes bad faith actors in all positions. The failure was allowing teams. That's why Washington hated them.
I'm curious how teams would be prevented.
Everything suggested also violated other parts of the constitution, so nothing was ever implemented. That was part of the 'it's a republic, if you can keep it.'
And for a mandated maximum age for politicians
I think term limits would take care of this without v being discriminatory. You can win an office once and a reelection once. It doesn’t matter if you either that office at 25 or 70.
How is age discriminatory? We don't debate the minimum age requirement, so what's so bad about an upper one?
I mean I do think someone younger than 35 could easily be a good president.
I'm not sure that would be a good idea because in the future, life expectancy could change. With advancement in medicine, there could be a time in the future when the average 80 year old is just as capable as the average 40 year old
It could potentially be handled like how we (should) handle minimum wage laws, adjusting for lived reality every so often.
Could be, but it's rather speculative to legislate on that in the current.
I think it's healthy for politics to have more youthful individuals in the mix. And I think it's also important that the elderly are protected from themselves (thinking about McConnell and Feinstein).
If there's a minimum age, because of competence, there should be a maximum. It can then always debated about suspending that or raising the age if it's medically appropriate. But if rather see people retire in good health and spending time with their grandchildren.
Technically, I don't think supreme Court appointments are necessarily lifetime appointments. Appointments to the federal judiciary are lifetime appointments, but the constitution doesn't specify that federal judges can't be rotated in and out of the supreme Court. I could be remembering that wrong though, it's been a while since my last read through.
While you are at it, add term limits to congress and senate seats as well.
That just makes the new person very bribeable
What? Unlike now?
While the current ones are not at all bribed? At least it would spread the corruption amongst more people.
Please goddess no.
Why no? You want to keep the 80+ guys who are firmly in some companies pocket sitting there?
Term limits is just a RW talking point. It would help nothing.
Never heard it being biased in any way. And I think, the Republicans would actually have more at stake here, with some of them being positively antique.
Yeah, instead of having a lifetime appointment, or having a specific number of justices, they could just make it so that, at the beginning of the 4 year presidential term, the President gets to nominate a fixed number of Supreme Court justices, who serve for a fixed number of years.
I heard somebody propose that system, and I can't help thinking that it would solve a lot of the problems with our Supreme Court.
There are some laws tied to the lifetime of a person, like appointing certain judges, and copyright law, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is always a better solution.
I think it would be better to divide up the US into four regions, with each its own president. That president gets to pick one national justice, and each region elects four justices independently of their president. Plus, the four regional presidents elect a figurehead president to represent the nation, who gets to pick an final justice. 21 national justices in total, five of them picked by their respective president. When a president is removed from office, their justice follows.
This increases the separations of powers, and allows for the national court to have their pool of justices change relatively often. Keeping the minds of our judiciary fresh is important, otherwise they fall out of touch with the citizens they are supposed to serve.
It's because if politicians aren't professional grifters, they are supposed to resign and indict new elections, if the parliament doesn't have the numbers to pass laws.
I don't know how you have so many upvotes when your statement is so wrong.
I could have been more precise and said presidential elections. It is a fact, presidential elections can only be every four years in the US. Unless there is a clause I'm unaware of that allows the possibility of them being more frequent. Whether it is a fuckup is a matter of opinion.
Well you also from context seem to be implicitly comparing a presidential system to a parliament system which had different design goals. The presidential system isn't good but the fatal flaw is treating the president like an elected king, not how often you can vote against them. The fatal flaw is not fixing the two party system. The fatal flaw was that it was designed by people doing their best to appease southern shitbags. The fatal flaw was they made the system too hard to change.
Voting for our king every 4 years was the improvement, it was everything else that was regressive.