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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.
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.
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.
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.