https://archive.is/sLsm1 Are Politicians Too Old? California Democrats Want to Debate an Age Cap.
“We can’t just act like it didn’t happen and like we aren’t going to make changes as a result,” Eric Kingsbury, a San Francisco Democrat, said of Mr. Biden’s decline. “Everyone saw it with their own eyes, and a ton of people told them what they saw wasn’t the truth.” Mr. Kingsbury, 36, is a member of the little-known yet locally powerful San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.
This should be a discussion for all politicians not just Democrats.
Death was a limiting factor in the early history of USA.
Now citizens/politicians reach 80-90 years of age.
Presidential minions shield politicians from public scrutiny.
And there is the problem of the politician that was fine when elected but deteriorates while in office.
Strom Thurmond & Joe Biden are examples of politicians past their prime while in office.
Nancy Pelosi & Bernie Sanders & Charles E. Grassley examples of elders functioning well in their 80’s. But they are the exception in 80 year folk.
Our nation has minimum age for president, senator & house of representatives. [35, 30, 25]
Why not maximum age? I propose age 75 as the upper limit.
Time for another constitutional amendment?
The nation should have a mentally fit president. I almost typed “mentally & physical fit” president. Then I recalled JFK & FDR had physical problems but were very mentally fit for the office of the presidency.
People age differently. You mentioned several individuals who seem to be mentally fit in their 80s. I know people in their 90’s who are sharp as a tack. A friend’s mother was over 100 and she could carry on an intelligent, knowledgeable conversation including current affairs.
I won’t mention names, but on the other hand there are elected officials who I consider never to be mentally fit, regardless of their age.
And, as medical advances are made and knowledge about diet and one’s physical condition (exercising) improve, the age of being mentally fit will probably edge higher.
As bad as some of our decisions have been, and some have been very bad, I don’t think we need an upper limit. What we need are educated and knowledgeable voters. Good luck trying to fix that.
There is no regulation which is perfect. Airline pilots have to retire at 65, whether they are still capable or not. Sorry Charlie, you aged out.
I would not let perfection be the enemy of the good; and set 75 as the upper limit to be elected. (Therefore a Rep would work until 77, a Senator til 82, a President ‘til 79). Personally I would do the same for judges, as I want people “in touch” with current society making those calls.
There is much that these people can do if they “age out”. There are still committees, public service organizations to run, political pacs to be part of. It’s not as though we’re saying “You can’t do anything”, just “we want younger blood” overall.
While I am a big fan of FDR, I also think the amendment that rebuked him (after he was dead) was the right thing to do. Someone serving 4 terms has a chance to build up a power base that could be the end of the Republic, as we are now seeing. (I’m sure Republicans thought the same thing in 1936 and 1940.) It’s telling that even Democrats and states which voted Democratic for FDR voted in favor of the 22nd Amendment. Apparently the issue was evident to those who lived in that time, whether it favored them or not.
More important than upper and lower age limits is having candidates and elected pols actually rubbing shoulders and minds with Normal People in Public Places as by far the best test of mental maturity and stability as well as simple comprehension of what’s going on. Remember Bush and the checkout scanner? That was a useful tell of just how out of touch with real life he was.
We need to STOP electing people who we do not know. Simple. Almost impossible the way the underpinnings of democracy have been eroded away.
Jefferson, long after his retirement from public life, became deeply worried about both the concentration of power in the hands of small groups of “connected” people, as well as the increasing ignorance of the common people about the reality of governance requiring care, compromise, and patience.
the article however, nearest my heart, is the division of the counties into Wards. these will be pure & elementary republics, the sum of all which, taken together, composes the state, & will make of the whole a true democracy as to the business of the Wards, which is that of nearest and daily concern. the affairs of the larger sections of counties, of states, & of the Union, not admitting personal transaction by the people, will be delegated to agents elected by themselves; and representation will thus be substituted where personal action becomes impracticable. yet, even over these representative organs, should they become corrupt and perverted, the division into wards, constituting the people, in their wards, a regularly organised power, enables them, by that organisation, to crush, regularly and peaceably, the usurpations of their unfaithful agents, and rescues them from the dreadful necessity of doing it insurrectionally.
There it is. The division into wards throws the hornets nest of policymaking and real power into the hands of actual normal people. The famous, now almost totally vanished New England Town Meetings being the most famous exemplar.
I used to be against term limits for Congress. The argument being that if you constantly turned over the politicians, the ones with the power become the unelected bureaucrats that move the paperwork around on capital hill. However, given the “lifetime” politicians on both sides that have never held a real job for any length of time, there needs to be some change. Get elected for 2 consecutive terms, have to then sit out a term before running again. Some states do this with the governor, why not give it a shot at the federal level.
Instant runoff nonpartisan (jungle) primaries (with boundaries established by bipartisan commissions) would go a long way to fix such without the need for a constitutional amendment.
If we had pols that better represented the will of the majority, I think we would care less about how long they served.
Just for the record, that trope of Bush being “amazed” at supermarket scanners was not real. He was looking at a new scanner which had the ability to weigh produce (not common then) and to read bar codes even if they had been mangled. He got a bad rap thanks to a photo and caption in the NYT.
AP Was There: Bush’s bum rap on ‘amazing’ barcode scanner
Published 12:36 PM EDT, December 4, 2018
WASHINGTON (AP) — One last time, for the record: It was not an ordinary supermarket scanner.
Days after the Times story exploded into news feeds everywhere, AP White House reporter Christopher Connell tracked down National Cash Register executives and set the record straight.
Marlin Fitzwater, Bush’s press secretary, devoted four angry pages to the incident in his memoir, “Call the Briefing.” He called the AP story knocking down the Times’ version “the single most courageous story of my White House years.”
Are we sure that isn’t spin by the White House press office? There have been a long string of Presidential gaffs that the PR people have tried to spin into something else. I was watching the night Gerry Ford insisted that Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union. It was clear what he said. The moderator of the debate was laffing. Carter was laffing. But the spin machine tried to repair the damage, over the next few days, anyway.
Then there was the time #41 tried the “common touch” by buying a pair of socks, at retail, himself. Some of us may remember the “photo op” in the White House kitchen, showing Gerry Ford heating up some English muffins, by himself. You need to wonder what the PR people are thinking, when they stage this sort of nonsense, because it invites ridicule.
Anything, really anything, that has a photo taken for PR is almost surely staged. But this one is the most likely one to be true … I’ve read that the first family is given a relatively high level of privacy in their wing of the White House, and it quite possible that an early rising president might toast his own english muffin.
