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McConnell and Feinstein episodes raise age concerns about US leaders

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/mcconnell-feinstein-episodes-raise-questions-age-concerns-us-leaders

As the country's political leaders continue to get older, events and episodes of decline among politicians continue to happen publicly.

McConnell and Feinstein episodes raise age concerns about US leaders

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6875734

People mentioned in this article are very old.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 81 Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), 90 President Joe Biden, 80 Former President Donald Trump, 77

12 comments

Milksteaks

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We need age and term limits to get these fossils out of office. I feel as though they're not capable of properly representing their electorate

zerkrazus

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Exactly. What do 80+ year olds know about the needs of modern kids, teenagers, and young adults? Hell, many of them probably still think rent is like $50/month.

TheBenCommandments

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That’s not even the biggest concern; they’re not at all invested in the future because they’re not a part of it. Why would they care about any of the consequences the choices/actions they make now that we’ll be dealing with 20 years from now?

zerkrazus

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Yep, pretty much. They have no incentive to care about any of it really, because the vast majority of them will be long gone by then.

Centillionaire

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Even if it was like a decade or two, there needs to be a limit.

Hanabie

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The same is true for Japan. Our leaders are completely out of touch, to the point that the minister tasked with Cybersecurity never even owned a smartphone. He'd been using an old flip phone.

Apart from an age limit, term limits need to be installed for any position of power, whether that's political, economical or judicial functions. Worldwide.

Humans are never to be trusted. Power corrupts.

kboy101222

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I mean, I suspect no one is making malware for flip phones. Man's just planning ahead!

Seris_

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Politicians should be required to resign if they hit retirement age. We already require airline pilots to retire, why not the people leading the country as well

Xariphon

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Our laws already exclude young people for nothing else than presumed inability, regardless of demonstrations of actual ability.

And yet we have no laws excluding the geriatric, even in cases of demonstrated inability.

wolfpack86

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I think age limits are an option but are not really going after the root of the problem, nor are they a good solution. Our arguments that the elderly can't represent the youth can be made the other way just the same.

One one end, the districts are too large, so you end up with the shit show we have. You don't end up with local communities voting on who reflects that community best. It squeezes out any opportunity for third parties.

Secondly (Don't get attached to the people in this, the argument carries to any party/district), the democratic party will not allow AOC to run for Schumer's post. There's no supported way to ask the electorate if they would like a changing of the guard. Suggesting to primary someone who has been as successful as Schumer or McConnell would be political suicide. So you're stuck voting for Schumer/McConnell, even if you would prefer the youth candidate... in the NY example, Schumer still gets the votes and the party keeps supporting him. It's a blue seat and that matters more than getting "accurate" representation. I'd push for doing ranked choice primaries for all federal positions.

TL;DR -- smaller districts. New parties. Encourage (or mandate?) primaries against incumbents.

OldWoodFrame

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For smaller districts...I like the Wyoming Rule but even that only gets you to 574 seats, still more than half a million people per district.

The original House apportionment, signed by Washington, was 1 seat for every 33k people, which would certainly allow for more unique representation but would also mean more than 10,000 House seats these days.

wolfpack86

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I'd suggest a district should be no smaller than 1/3 of the population of a single state (190K)... Putting it around 17-1800 reps. It's exactly a 4 fold increase.

Something like 60 metro areas are above 1M and will have representation of 6+ reps, vs currently only 15ish get that today.

We will see more people elected that more accurately reflect the values of that specific area. This also works for small population states.

A house of this size presents logistics challenges and difficulties in determining committee appointments. But that seems solvable with the technology we have available today.

The real barrier is that this will result in a forfeiture of individual power and cede some control to smaller parties. So nobody will actually propose this.