She was mentally unfit to serve for the last couple years. It was a travesty many countries seem to have no mental bar required to serve or even reasonable age limits (Feinstein was 90!) Any decision "she" was made in the last couple years was made by her aids and not her. This is not how democracy is supposed to work.
Details:
> Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.
With our aging population, we need to figure out how to be inclusive of those who can contribute, while identifying those who can not. Hard age limits are likely becoming less desirable as the population ages - retirement at 55 will seem like a joke. But that doesn't mean we should just accept people who are not with it in various positions of power.
Between her and McConnell and the other gerontocrats in Washington, I’m really baffled. Why do these people grip the reins of power until their knuckles turn white? What is so important about political horse trading that they have to literally haul you out of office on a stretcher?
First, some places, like in McConnell's case, are just statistically going to go to a particular party, due to demographics (or gerrymandering), and primary elections famously don't draw people to the polls (if there's a challenger at all).
California and senate elections are slightly better in that regard, however, look at how much money Feinstein was able to raise over her opponents. This is nothing special about Feinstein, it's an advantage incumbents generally enjoy:
I think getting this money out of politics is a start to ensuring elections are based on the candidate themselves & their policies and less around how much special interests already have invested in them. I don't have any ideas about how to get more people to show up specifically for primary elections, but the ideas people have around getting more people to vote in general elections could help, like expanding absentee voting, making it a holiday, etc.
> The U.S. electorate is aging: 52% of registered voters are ages 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996. This shift has occurred in both partisan coalitions. More than half of Republican and GOP-leaning voters (56%) are ages 50 and older, up from 39% in 1996. And among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, half are 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996.
> Another way to consider the aging of the electorate is to look at median age. The median age among all registered voters increased from 44 in 1996 to 50 in 2019. It rose from 43 to 52 among Republican registered voters and from 45 to 49 among Democratic registered voters.
I think that on average, people consider age significant, so they expect their candidate to be around as old as them. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it helps me feel less baffled at least.
Why do they cling to power? I imagine the personality type that seeks political power in the first place tends to want to keep it. It's good to be the king.
At the end of the day, the people continue to elect them. If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out.
Name recognition is powerful.
Seniority leads to leadership of key committees in the US Congress.
But, I do agree that this is a problem. RBG was another example - had she retired a few years prior to her death, the state of SCOTUS would be very different today. Was she addicted to the power? Did she truly think nobody younger could do a better job? Same for Feinstein, McConnell, Biden, and many others on both sides of the aisle.
Because, like most people, they want to feel they have purpose in their life. Giving up the job is almost like accepting death, especially if they are old.
Yes, and she's not the only one who is (edit: was) serving without being functional[1]. We need to start talking about upper age limits for public office. I believe it'd require a constitutional amendment, but I expect there's lots of support for it from all sides. I'd suggest 65 as a maximum age for being elected, which means one could serve to about age 71, for a six-year Senate term.
Are age limits viable in our aging population? I think they may not work because it would exclude so many people and many voters will be aged as well? I think a low bar competency test would be more viable.
Why exactly should the elderly be exempt from proper representation? There are plenty of things to criticize Nancy Pelosi about, for example, but still she's more intelligent and coherent than 99% of Congress.
Say we have a professional psychiatrist, or a whole board of them, evaluating the mental competence of candidates. Occasionally they would designate one as incompetent, who would then be removed from the election.
This would seem to be less democratic rather than more. The voters have less options than before, so the shift in power is from voters to experts.
I've been really surprised by the conversation around this being centered around age when, in my opinion, the controversy should be about a group of staffers exercising the power of a Senator with the tacit backing of the party. There is video/audio of staffers actively teller her what to say and how to vote. The office appears to have usurped her power. Voters aren't being represented by the person they elected.
Her staff could just finish out her term and nothing would change but that's illegal because she's dead.
It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.
Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality.
Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws.
I encourage you to run a campaign, just in a local county. You will find there are things one can't see from the outside that make this sentiment naively false.
Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.
RCV advocates miss the point entirely. It's not that people want to vote for third parties but can't. It's that the candidates that survive the major parties' primary elections have only to pander to their insane bases. In California where no-party-indicateds outnumber Republicans, the top-2 system is effectivley a Democratic primary.
Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.
We should have the ability to do a recall when mental faculties come into question. Have a bare minimum mental fitness test: Time awareness, location awareness, action consequence relationship, grade 6 comprehension and control over bodily functions
Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.
If you're going to lay responsibility at the feet of the voters it isn't fair to throw out a "It is how it’s supposed to work.". The voters decide how it is supposed to work by making arguments and talking to each other and expressing opinions. If voters have power then expressing what qualities a politician should have helps the process.
And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically.
And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.
When do you think some third party is going to arise out of the broken cesspool of one-party machine politics in the state of dementia known as California? Please, fill us in.
She held a position of incredible importance (chair of the senate judiciary committee). Her leaving would cause a stalemate and block all judicial nominations.
That's a fact, not a guess.
She should have left, but the reason she didn't should be happening either.
Yeah this is just an unfortunate reality of the situation we're living in today. People think she was on some sort of ego trip by remaining in the senate or something, when really it was just the best option for making sure Biden is able to appoint judges. She was able to get a bunch of them approved recently, we should be thankful for that. People saying stuff like "thank God she's finally gone" are so ignorant. Newsom will appoint a democrat, that democrat will get no meaningful committee appointments, and we'll be in a worse situation than we were.
There must be age limit for any job, including senators and presidents.
Or, test them for physicals and minds before they can take on the job, do it annually, it's a normal practice in all other fields, it's good for all sides.
She was also incredibly right wing vs. her constituents and was extremely bought off. She did some civil rights stuff early in her career, but it’s been 100% corruption and destroying the environment for this entire century.
She wasn’t senile that entire time.
(I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)
> (I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)
That's nonsense. She voted like every other cookie cutter corporate Democrat, i.e. whatever her handlers told her to do. At the tail end of her career, it was pretty explicit (and disgusting to watch): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-dianne-feinste...
I know it’s rude to say negative things about a person who has just passed, but I can’t help feeling happy that such an influential Senate seat will finally go to someone that’s not over 70 (hopefully).
There should be age limits for public office and it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be. We have too many dusty old codgers running things and ruining things, clawing at power and money while destroying civilization for their great grandchildren (which is all the worse, because they’ve met them).
When I see someone like Feinstein elected repeatedly, it’s blatant evidence of how broken politics is in America. In California, apparently, policy positions, personal character, and corruption don’t matter, you can elect a corpse in a wheelchair if it has a D next to its name, and they did.
Adding an age limit would just get you a slightly younger equivalent in that seat (wheelchair?).
At least now you have the (minuscule, I admit) chance that some secure senator will go against his or her party because they know their seat is secure in re-election.
Many of the policy positions held by Congresspersons I believe to be directly tied to their age and place in life and their lack of understanding around technology, all of which are best rectified by reducing the median age of those serving in Congress. While this does nothing to affect special interest groups, lobbying, or corruption, those are separate issues with separate solutions. Age limits are not a panacea, but they are necessary.
I know the easy approach here is for people to want an age limit in Congress, but I've always been more partial to a term limit.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
My problem with term limits is being a politician is a job like any other. You get a performance review every few years. But by the time you get really good at the job you're forced to quit.
If there are age minimums for these federal offices there should be age maximums.
I think being too “good at the job” is part of what people are worried about for politicians.
Yes there are skills to be learned to be effective in such a system, but being too entrenched in it can lead to forming relationships that overshadow the relationship with their constituents.
I don't think it's fair to assume that votes are representative of performance. Politics are a popularity contest first and unfortunately that means image is more important than actions.
I'm not totally opposed to max age limits, that has tradeoffs just like term limits would.
Theres no magic bullet unfortunately. Any line in the sand will have people caught in the crossfire, whether that's a person over the age limit that would make an excellent representative or a person who is blocked from a third term that actually isn't corrupted by the machine of political favor, lobbyists, etc.
Agreed. There may be some older people that are still totally capable. Not everyone's cognitive functions crumble at the same time, to the same degree, or even in the same way. Age limits are a bad solution.
Instead of term limits, I’d much rather they be paid a 99% percentile wage until death, but be banned from accepting any other income or gifts, investing in stocks or owning any sort of business or investment property (again, for life).
It might be better to lower the income to 90th or 50th percentile, so only people that actually wanted the job
would take it.
Ideally, the restrictions would extend to the kids. It would definitely extend to the spouses.
Also, all no campaign donations over $50. Finally, all campaign communications must be publicly archived in realtime, and no more political ads. (The latter is because some politicians now tell different, personalized lies to each constituent, thanks to the internet).
Another possibility is to let anyone volunteer for congress, then pick the winner at random from the pool each term. This worked amazingly well for local positions in some country that tried it. (Government efficiency immediately doubled or something.)
Salary proposals always run into one issue though: independently wealthy individuals have a massive advantage. Even if you limit their personal contributions to their campaign, it's difficult to impossible to prevent a wealthy person from making themselves much more well known in a campaign race.
A wealthy person is also totally fine with whatever the salary is, because they already have a bunch of money.
Oh I'm all for anything that can be done to prevent politicians from getting rich through insider trading, "gifts", favors, and happening into fortunes just after leaving office.
I see that as a different problem to solve, but yeah if the solution to one can supercede the other I'd get behind that.
> Ideally, the restrictions would extend to the kids. It would definitely extend to the spouses.
I actually really hate this idea whenever it comes up, at least for the kids. It feels rather oppressive that you could have your largely-estranged parent decide to get into politics, and have that entirely derail your life.
The current system gives us a bunch of grifters like the Trump kids or Hunter Biden, to be sure, but I'd rather directly punish the parent who's being corrupt than their children who don't even hold office.
Term limits are just a mechanism to transfer power to un-elected officials and lobbyists, and to make sure any decent politicians are kicked out before they can have any lasting impact.
Imagine working at a job where there were rules that forced your company to lay off all the most experienced folks after a few years.
1- One six-year term on the presidency. Enough time to get stuff done and see the results, but then you're out. The current structure gives the American public 1-2 years of productivity, then they go into campaign mode on the tax payers dime.
2- All official party nominees get the exact same budget for campaigning. Creates a level playing field and neutralizes the power of lobbying
3- Congressman, Senators, Governors are limited to a single 6 year term. This will create a lot of churn, require voters to get engaged to understand the candidates better, and eliminate lifetime politicians who will inevitably be corrupted (I'm a cynic).
Need to ponder how to hedge the power of the people behind the scenes who support the office since they are unelected and undoubtedly powerful (I'm thinking about the people writing Biden's scripts, who are they, who elected them, what do they believ, etc.... we know he isn't doing it).
I'd throw in restructuring the Supreme Court. Lifetime appointments seem to have devolved into them being wildly politically swingy based on when very-old people decide to retire (or die), with a strong incentive to then install the youngest doctrinaire ideologues you can get through the Senate. (And to engage in political brinksmanship to push an appointment back a few months to give it to the other party if you can, etc.)
Give them a fixed number of years and have new ones appointed on a schedule that's synced to presidential terms.
I guarantee that "require voters to get engaged to understand the candidates better" is the exact opposite of what would happen. Voters ain't got time for that shit, they'd more strongly become single-party lever-pullers.
I don't see a need for term limits- as long as they keep being popular and able to do the job, they should do it.
I see a need for impartial testing of "able to do the job", such as "can count backwards from 20 without falling asleep or missing any numbers or going briefly catatonic".
My main concern without term limits is when an elected official moves from being popular and effective at their job to being effective at getting reelected. Those are very different skills, with the latter risking politicians that are only reelected because of the power, favors, and connections they have collected.
Term limits definitely aren't a magic fix, I just see the tradeoffs as worth it relative to my personal concerns.
There is a very likely possibility that Feinstein was senile, with reports she couldn't remember which votes she was taking and what she was doing, and thus she was goaded (or coerced) into maintaining her position by her aides who loved their positions, pay, and their power. There has been skepticism in some of the media but most of the mainstream media pundit class (nytimes op-ed pages and the like) won't broach such a topic because those aides are one of their own.
While I don't disagree that her staff was making decisions for her, most of the people in Congressional positions are making far less than $100k, and their pay has gone down in recent years, especially in context of inflation. Their pay is all available online: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44324 So I doubt that's a driving factor for any of them.
I know the easy approach here is for people to want an age limit in Congress, but I've always been more partial to a term limit.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
The problem with term limits is that they don't apply to lobbyists. Lobbyists basically writing most of the legislation is already a major problem, and it becomes worse when all the representatives are new to the office.
This is somewhat the difficulty of balancing the needs of governments. A short term/term limit leads to more inexperienced people doing the job. That's good in some ways - keeping new ideas coming in or keeping people from doing the job far too long. On the other hand, it means some large portion of the legislature is people who are more or less still learning. The process of writing good law that avoids unnecessary downsides, or simply understands the downsides and works to mitigate them isn't something you can just pick up over a weekend, especially when there aren't many people to learn it from.
As you say, it's easy to point to the folks who have been in office forever as being an issue, but there's also staff and lobbyists and other unelected roles that are hard to get rid of the influence of. At the end of the day, someone needs to be the expert, either on the vast array of issues that can come up in national government, or in how to actually do something about those issues.
Lobbyists are just part of it. The revolving door means politicians can become lobbyists when they hit their term limit and lobbyists can become politicians where there is an opening.
Amakudari is what Japan has, the so called descent from heaven. They fixed the revolving door by making it go one way. Government officials retire to lucrative corporate jobs in their retirement, but they can never get back in to Heaven
One really interesting question there, how much of the work is really don't by the elected official?
If a lot of the "real" work is done by the staffers, career government workers, etc then the politician really is the public face and occasionally redirecting the ship. I'd say there is less risk there and more to gain from fresh faces and opinions in that spot, again if that's how the workload shakes out behind the scenes
Wouldn't term limits atleast slightly mitigate this issue? Harder to be buddy buddy with the person in power of they keep changing every other term or two. But you are right about the influence of lobbyists. It's very messed up when an unknown unelected person can write parts of a law as is and get away with it
"Colleagues, critics and an increasingly restive field of aspiring successors have questioned her health and fitness for office — a concern, her supporters noted, that few have raised for male octogenarians in the Senate — but friends said she made her decision on her own timetable."
Proof is in the pudding, eh? But more seriously, plenty have criticized McConnell for his public health lapses, and the two of them together kicked off a lot of bipartisan (citizen) grumbling about old politicians. Then of course our main presidential candidates...
The kerfuffle about sexism when criticizing Feinstein is hogwash.
I don't know her full legacy, and I recall her being a good thorn in the side of Bush when he needed one. Sad it took this event to get a replacement.
And Newsom promised to put in a black woman, but also promised not to put in someone actually running for Senate. I wonder if the relevant groups of citizens care about that declaration.
> Since 1789, 301 [ed: 302] Senators have died in office. When a
sitting Member dies, the Senate and House of
Representatives carry out a number of actions based in part on chamber rules, statutes, long-standing practices, and other variables extant at the time of the Senator’s demise.
Readit News
Details:
> Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstei...
With our aging population, we need to figure out how to be inclusive of those who can contribute, while identifying those who can not. Hard age limits are likely becoming less desirable as the population ages - retirement at 55 will seem like a joke. But that doesn't mean we should just accept people who are not with it in various positions of power.
California and senate elections are slightly better in that regard, however, look at how much money Feinstein was able to raise over her opponents. This is nothing special about Feinstein, it's an advantage incumbents generally enjoy:
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/dianne-feins...
I think getting this money out of politics is a start to ensuring elections are based on the candidate themselves & their policies and less around how much special interests already have invested in them. I don't have any ideas about how to get more people to show up specifically for primary elections, but the ideas people have around getting more people to vote in general elections could help, like expanding absentee voting, making it a holiday, etc.
> The U.S. electorate is aging: 52% of registered voters are ages 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996. This shift has occurred in both partisan coalitions. More than half of Republican and GOP-leaning voters (56%) are ages 50 and older, up from 39% in 1996. And among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, half are 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996.
> Another way to consider the aging of the electorate is to look at median age. The median age among all registered voters increased from 44 in 1996 to 50 in 2019. It rose from 43 to 52 among Republican registered voters and from 45 to 49 among Democratic registered voters.
I think that on average, people consider age significant, so they expect their candidate to be around as old as them. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it helps me feel less baffled at least.
At the end of the day, the people continue to elect them. If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out.
Name recognition is powerful.
Seniority leads to leadership of key committees in the US Congress.
But, I do agree that this is a problem. RBG was another example - had she retired a few years prior to her death, the state of SCOTUS would be very different today. Was she addicted to the power? Did she truly think nobody younger could do a better job? Same for Feinstein, McConnell, Biden, and many others on both sides of the aisle.
This is their life. It is literally the only thing they have ever one in one form or another.
For many of us this would be like never touching a computer again after turning 65.
Dead Comment
[1] This article is from six years ago. https://www3.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2017/10/11/congres...
is: "McConnell’s frozen moment renews questions about America’s aged leaders" https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/mitch-mcconnell-...
Dead Comment
This would seem to be less democratic rather than more. The voters have less options than before, so the shift in power is from voters to experts.
So at least age limits are something everyone can prepare for and expect, rather than it being a surprise?
Her staff could just finish out her term and nothing would change but that's illegal because she's dead.
Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws.
[0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html
[1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count...
[3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID
[4] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/
Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.
Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.
And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically.
And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.
That's a fact, not a guess.
She should have left, but the reason she didn't should be happening either.
Or, test them for physicals and minds before they can take on the job, do it annually, it's a normal practice in all other fields, it's good for all sides.
She wasn’t senile that entire time.
(I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)
That's nonsense. She voted like every other cookie cutter corporate Democrat, i.e. whatever her handlers told her to do. At the tail end of her career, it was pretty explicit (and disgusting to watch): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-dianne-feinste...
Some stats on here "voting with Trump": https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/
She's clearly not at the top of that pile when sorting by Democrats.
There should be age limits for public office and it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be. We have too many dusty old codgers running things and ruining things, clawing at power and money while destroying civilization for their great grandchildren (which is all the worse, because they’ve met them).
When I see someone like Feinstein elected repeatedly, it’s blatant evidence of how broken politics is in America. In California, apparently, policy positions, personal character, and corruption don’t matter, you can elect a corpse in a wheelchair if it has a D next to its name, and they did.
That would create wrong incentives for pushing the retirement age upwards though.
People over 70 should not be running the country, and currently the median Congressperson is on social security. We have a problem.
At least now you have the (minuscule, I admit) chance that some secure senator will go against his or her party because they know their seat is secure in re-election.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
If there are age minimums for these federal offices there should be age maximums.
Yes there are skills to be learned to be effective in such a system, but being too entrenched in it can lead to forming relationships that overshadow the relationship with their constituents.
Theres no magic bullet unfortunately. Any line in the sand will have people caught in the crossfire, whether that's a person over the age limit that would make an excellent representative or a person who is blocked from a third term that actually isn't corrupted by the machine of political favor, lobbyists, etc.
Deleted Comment
It might be better to lower the income to 90th or 50th percentile, so only people that actually wanted the job would take it.
Ideally, the restrictions would extend to the kids. It would definitely extend to the spouses.
Also, all no campaign donations over $50. Finally, all campaign communications must be publicly archived in realtime, and no more political ads. (The latter is because some politicians now tell different, personalized lies to each constituent, thanks to the internet).
Another possibility is to let anyone volunteer for congress, then pick the winner at random from the pool each term. This worked amazingly well for local positions in some country that tried it. (Government efficiency immediately doubled or something.)
A wealthy person is also totally fine with whatever the salary is, because they already have a bunch of money.
I see that as a different problem to solve, but yeah if the solution to one can supercede the other I'd get behind that.
I actually really hate this idea whenever it comes up, at least for the kids. It feels rather oppressive that you could have your largely-estranged parent decide to get into politics, and have that entirely derail your life.
The current system gives us a bunch of grifters like the Trump kids or Hunter Biden, to be sure, but I'd rather directly punish the parent who's being corrupt than their children who don't even hold office.
Imagine working at a job where there were rules that forced your company to lay off all the most experienced folks after a few years.
Sounds miserable to me.
1- One six-year term on the presidency. Enough time to get stuff done and see the results, but then you're out. The current structure gives the American public 1-2 years of productivity, then they go into campaign mode on the tax payers dime.
2- All official party nominees get the exact same budget for campaigning. Creates a level playing field and neutralizes the power of lobbying
3- Congressman, Senators, Governors are limited to a single 6 year term. This will create a lot of churn, require voters to get engaged to understand the candidates better, and eliminate lifetime politicians who will inevitably be corrupted (I'm a cynic).
Need to ponder how to hedge the power of the people behind the scenes who support the office since they are unelected and undoubtedly powerful (I'm thinking about the people writing Biden's scripts, who are they, who elected them, what do they believ, etc.... we know he isn't doing it).
Give them a fixed number of years and have new ones appointed on a schedule that's synced to presidential terms.
I see a need for impartial testing of "able to do the job", such as "can count backwards from 20 without falling asleep or missing any numbers or going briefly catatonic".
Term limits definitely aren't a magic fix, I just see the tradeoffs as worth it relative to my personal concerns.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
As you say, it's easy to point to the folks who have been in office forever as being an issue, but there's also staff and lobbyists and other unelected roles that are hard to get rid of the influence of. At the end of the day, someone needs to be the expert, either on the vast array of issues that can come up in national government, or in how to actually do something about those issues.
If a lot of the "real" work is done by the staffers, career government workers, etc then the politician really is the public face and occasionally redirecting the ship. I'd say there is less risk there and more to gain from fresh faces and opinions in that spot, again if that's how the workload shakes out behind the scenes
"Colleagues, critics and an increasingly restive field of aspiring successors have questioned her health and fitness for office — a concern, her supporters noted, that few have raised for male octogenarians in the Senate — but friends said she made her decision on her own timetable."
Proof is in the pudding, eh? But more seriously, plenty have criticized McConnell for his public health lapses, and the two of them together kicked off a lot of bipartisan (citizen) grumbling about old politicians. Then of course our main presidential candidates...
The kerfuffle about sexism when criticizing Feinstein is hogwash.
I don't know her full legacy, and I recall her being a good thorn in the side of Bush when he needed one. Sad it took this event to get a replacement.
And Newsom promised to put in a black woman, but also promised not to put in someone actually running for Senate. I wonder if the relevant groups of citizens care about that declaration.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12393