Condolences, but 80 is too fucking old.
In the last two years 8 Congressmen have died in office. 7 of them were Democrats, and only two were younger than 70, and none younger than 65.
Ok?
I don’t even want to imagine what kind of wild takes would an 80yo republican possess
Yeah, I bet it’s like Nancy Pelosi, her net worth is the equivalent of her working as speaker of the house for like 2,000 years or something. Glad that’s not a red flag at all? I guarantee if you bought a car for 30k the IRS would be up your butt where you got the money.
Don’t worry, they’ll find some 79 year old to take his place.
There’s an oddly well written scientific paper on Death in Congress. Made me laugh out loud.
Whenever an elected official has a heart attack, stroke, or cancer they should have to publicly disclose it.
Maximum age for first term should be 59 and no more than 8 years. That puts them at 67 and they should retire.
They need to fix those age requirements. Even God wanted that guy to retire but he was hanging on.
Ya. He should have retired 20 years ago!
Jesus Christ. Get the old fucks out of Congress.
I don’t know. As I get older I am developing opinions. A lot of them. On everything! What sauce is best with cheeseburgers. How short should my neighbours’ lawn be. Should banks be open on sundays.
By 80, if I’m still kicking, I’ll be ready to discuss any boring topic for hours before a vote. Anything.
Meanwhile, you get lucky if your representative’s staffers read the bills before a vote.
all federal employees should have mandatory retirement at 70. Including congress, judges, and president.
70?? No one over the age of 63.
I believe it was Japan, but I was having a casual conversation with someone from SEA area and he told me publicly traded companies had a mandatory retirement age of like 68 for executives. I thought that was interesting.
I’d go to 75, maybe 78, but no more than 80. That’s definitely time to go.
Mean age in the US is 39. Lets round it to 40, make it 1.5 times that and cap it at 60.
This is the best way to do it. If I the future people are living well into their 150s and the average age increases, so too does the maximum age in office.
Only if cognitive capabilities follow the same trajectory…
75 is the mandatory retirement age for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
I know some really spry 80 year olds but I wouldn’t trust any of them with such responsibility. They’re out of touch, forgetful, etc. Great partners for golf, gaming, and other forms of entertainment but I don’t want them in charge of anything.
My grandpa is politically shrewd and still as smart as he ever was in his 90s. He’s very atypical for that and spends most of his time sleeping and managing the general pain and discomfort of being that old. At such advanced age one really should be retiring.
No functioning democracy allows their representatives to sit for twelve terms.
Two words “term limits”
12 terms sounds ridiculous, but they’re only 2 year terms. That’s far too short, and only keeps every Congressional Rep in constant reelection mode. No wonder Congress does such a crappy job, they’re always raising money, and/or campaigning.
They should have a 4 year term, with 50% being elected in the Midterms and the Presidential elections.
Changing all of the term limits and age restrictions needs to be a priority. Keeping zombies in power does no one any good.
Agreed. Plato even wrote about it in Laws.
In “Laws,” Plato suggests that senators should serve for a term of one year to ensure that they remain accountable and do not become too entrenched in power.
Eh, I get what you’re saying, but term limits aren’t a prerequisite for democracies.
The problem was neoliberals ran the party for generations and would
blackmailblackball anyone that worked on a primary against a neoliberal incumbent.Even to the point they were robbing state parties and threatening to cut entire state parties off of their reps didn’t toe the line.
That’s over, it’s been over for a year.
Even if the current DNC chair did a 180 as I’m typing this, he’s been dumping all the money stolen via the Victory Fund back on state parties. The DNC couldn’t use the old threats if they wanted to.
Without that pressure from the top, progressives will replace neoliberal and republican incumbents.
And if a progressive gets thru the presidential primary and into the Oval, then they get to name the next DNC president.
That’s what pisses me off the most these days…
I spent decades trying to convince people the DNC was a problem. And as soon as the voting members fixed it, everyone started to realize how bad it was, but not that it’s been fixed.
I don’t understand how people keep falling for billionaire propaganda.
I don’t believe it’s been fixed and it will take some convincing. And I’m probably not the only one.
Same boat for me. I can’t argue however that there have been many steps in the right directly recently.
I don’t understand how people keep falling for billionaire propaganda.
Because there is, quite literally, nothing else. Who is talking about it being fixed besides you? Anybody with any credibility?
The DNC’s problem is exemplified by the old joke - If a Democrat found a magic lamp, rubbed it, and got three wishes from a djinn, they’d negotiate down to one and then wish for whatever the nearest Republican wants.
The DNC doesn’t stand for anything beyond lining the pockets of insider traders like Nancy Pelosi. Same as the Republicans, just minus all the goosestepping, conspiracy theories, and shilling for supplements. They aren’t the same, but being the only alternative doesn’t inherently make them better by default. They lost the plot trying to make the Clintons into a dynasty.
Fixing the systemic problems at the root of this goes all the way back to how these parties responded to Ross Perot and the elimination of third party viability. A strictly two party system is not a functional democracy. It’s a one party system masquerading as two parties.
There’s really one political party in the USA - the monied party. Which is why there’s so much billionaire propaganda for people to fall for.
Who is talking about it being fixed besides you? Anybody with any credibility?
NPR is a fantastic resource…
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin says President Trump is a “dictator-in-chief” whose agenda is “fascism dressed in a red tie” and his party must fight back against his policies.
“Now look, folks, I’m sick and tired of this Democratic party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” Martin said. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight. We’re not going to have a hand tied behind our back anymore.”
Speaking during the first session of the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis on Monday, Martin said the Democratic Party has to stop trying to win arguments over policy and politics and do more to win future elections.
“>You know what winning the argument gets you? A nice round of applause and a few likes on Instagram,” Martin said. “But the reality is it doesn’t make life any better for any person. We have to stop settling on winning arguments with each other. We have to win elections.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5515631/dnc-democrats-ken-martin-trump-facism
Fixing the systemic problems at the root
Is what happened over a year ago when the ~400 voting members of the DNC pivoted away from neoliberals…
If the last year wasn’t enough, look at his track record in Minnesota and what happened during the decade he ran it
He’s a known quantity, the last year of gains hasn’t been a fluke, and everyone is just as much “not trump” in those elections as they’ve always been.
The DNC doesn’t stand for anything
This is the problem…
You think of the DMC as an entity…
It’s not, it’s ~400 people that vote for a dictator for four years if and only if a Republican wins the presidency.
2025 was the first time since 2017 since those ~400 got a say, because we settled for Biden as voters in the middle. They fucked up in 2017, they didn’t know what to do and Hillary and the “victory fund” was the only thing keeping them from bankruptcy, and that came with strings.
But by 2025 a lot of them were dead or no longer voting members, and a few had changed their mind.
So we pivoted
You have to understand how the system works, to understand when it changes, why it changes, and how it changes
I 100% understand the anger with “the party” and for the last 30 years I’d agreed with you, if I was older I’d have agreed for longer.
But shit changed, and if Martin paves the wave for FDR 2.0, that’s who picks the next head of the DNC.
You can be mad it’s a long process, but don’t fucking spend your time telling everyone to quit a marathon when we’re 200 yards from the finish line and no ones in sight behind us.
You have no fucking clue how hard it’s been to get this close, this is not the time to quit.
2025 was the first time since 2017
Your timeline is misaligned by at least a decade and missing the forest for the trees. In 2025, we’re on the brink of WWIII. The DNC has been hand-in-iron-fist with the GQP since 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Both parties merrily marching us to fascist authoritarianism. The only disagreement being who’d be the eventual Fuhrer.
But shit changed, and if Martin paves the wave for FDR 2.0
This is the problem with Dems. They’re fixated on repeating the mistakes of the past because they’ve only read the sanitized versions of history used in public schools. FDR 1.0 caused the double-dip in the Great Depression with his New Deal. Friedman’s Economic History of the United States covered it thoroughly. Maybe try reading some more modern economics strategies, like UBI, or wildly crazy shit like re-enacting the prohibition against Congress owning securities, enacting anti-gerrymandering legislation, and open-auditing of all electronic voting machines, plus enacting a general cap on all campaign expenditures of a nominal value with any remainders automatically allocated to the federal treasury to restore impartiality to our elected representatives.
The anger you’re seeing is because not only is the process long, but the outcomes are stupid and not worthwhile. Biden put on a demonstration of what competent leadership looks like. It was impressive to watch the things his cabinet was accomplishing. If it were any other yesteryear, it would have been an administration lauded for its competence.
But literally the one thing they didn’t touch was any of the linchpins to their lucrative kleptocratic establishment. All of the mechanisms that could have prevented allowing a known pedophile a second term in the oval office would have required addressing systemic corruptions that would have disturbed their seats of power. Instead, the Biden administration had other priorities instead of preventing what did happen - a rigged election. Thanks for the “assist”, Elon. As a reward for his help, Elon gets to rummage around in federal databases destroying evidence of this and other crimes. And Dems get to watch once again, as the minority party plays them for the fools they are.
You might not think this is the time to quit. I don’t think you should have ever started because you’re still pulling for the wrong team. There is no evidence to suggest your efforts are anything but too little, much too late.
At this point, I am incredibly skeptical that America has a peaceful way out of the current situation we’re in. Dems are very much not anti-authoritarian. They will not give up the executive powers that the GQP has so graciously secured for them. That’s the one thing you can always count on. Power, once centralized, is only ever decentralized through violence.
Europeans are so desperate for the schadenfreude of watching America collapse and fail, without any regard to how badly that would go for THEM. America being swept from world power would cause far more problems than it would solve, and it would take years to recover.
And self-righteous Europe doesn’t have any moral ground to stand on, anyway. What America is going through is happening in most European countries. While they’re bitching about America, the far-right influence is quickly increasing in their countries, too. Stop giving us bad advice, and fix your own house.
Hungary managed to kick out their well-entrenched far-right government, proving that it is possible. We’re going to to do the same thing in America over the next two elections, deal with whatever post-MAGA nonsense those traitor pedophiles cook up, and then we can start pointing fingers at Europe, and demand they deal with their far-right issues, before we end up with another WWII situation.
Who’s european in this conversation? I’m not.
Projection ain’t just for the cinemas, my guy.
Maybe instead of making assumptions, try asking questions instead. You don’t know as much as you assume.
You’re not American, that’s the point.
Your timeline is misaligned by at least a decade and missing the forest for the trees
You’re confusing me describing reality, with me saying that should be the way it is…
That’s the same reason medicine women were burnt at the stake.
I didn’t read anything else you typed, and I won’t see anything else you ever type again…
Shits too important to waste effort on lost causes.
Shits too important to waste effort on lost causes.
If you really believed that, you’d be focusing your efforts elsewhere.
The propaganda is effective, people are stupid, and education is intentionally poor to keep it that way.
This is such a stupid take. 🤣
Like there’s a shadowy cabal of hooded billionaires saying “the people have started to vote for Bernie Sanders - we must lobby to reduce education spending so that in 15-20 years people will make worse decisions” <evil laughter ensues>
That is such a stupid take.
Like there’s not a possibility for imperialistic capitalist democracies to develop an autopoietic culture/spectacle for producing the exact same effect as you describe, distributed and self perpetuating, without any sort of need for shadowy cabals. Like the selfish greed of hundreds/thousands of billionaires enabled by a leaky political system don’t add up to the same shit, just more powerful and less conspiratorial.
I wish there was a shadowy guy in the background. That would make it pretty easy to point my finger and say, “hey, THATS HIM!!!” But unfortunately, that’s not the case.
It’s not one shadowy guy in the background. It’s Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes, and Rupert Murdoch, literally standing right next to Donald Trump.
Like there’s not a possibility for imperialistic capitalist democracies to develop a culture/spectacle for producing the exact same effect as you describe, distributed and self perpetuating, without any sort of need for shadowy cabals.
There doesn’t seem to be any sign of it. It would strongly help your point if people weren’t on average much better educated than at any time in our history.
There doesn’t seem to be any sign of it.
I can come back with DOIs if you’d like to read up on the topic.
It would strongly help your point if people weren’t on average much better educated than at any time in our history.
Hardly. They can both be true.
The “People today are dumber than ever” is such an old tired trope. Every generation has said the same thing. Kids these days are stupider than we were, people today are just less educated, blah blah blah.
If it were true then the entirety of humanity by now would be unable to function.
That’s something a hooded billionaire in a shadowy cabal would say 🤔
But no, the degradation of the american education system began decades before Bernie ever ran for president. The damage has already been done.
Refusing to allow voters to re-elect their preferred candidate just because they’ve hit some arbitrary time limit doesn’t seem very democratic to me
We definitely have a ton of problems with our campaign finance regulations and enforcement of those regulations which makes it so incumbents have a hugely unfair advantage because they’re just swimming in oceans of perfectly legal bribe money, but terms limits are a bad way to fix that problem imo. Punishes voters for lawmakers being shitty.
I hear this argument a lot. “Voters should be trusted.”
Voters gave us Trump.
Once you have power, you don’t want to let it go. It doesn’t matter if you are elected every two years or every four. You have power and as you stay in office you accumulate more and more power. In theory it’s to help your constituents but in the end it corrupts.
We can decide that that people shouldn’t be career politicians. We can go encourage these people that they can still serve the public by doing other things besides holding office.
Democracy always has arbitrary rules to it, nothing can ever be “fully” democratic.
If the system would be that at the end of second term the politicians get (with dignity, grace, and honours) executed in order to keep the ruling body impartial & fresh that is just part of the system.
Exactly as much as that babies can’t vote, that non-citizens or women can’t vote (despite living there), electoral bs votes, mandatory/non-mandatory voting, etc.
Most of the above are there to mitigate a circumstance that isn’t really avoidable.
One of such is ppl not investing the time to study the issues & options (vibe-voting, or like supporting a sports team) … yet later showing consistent public support for things that are not getting even discussed.So what is more/less democratic - “allowing” ppl to vote in the same 90+ incompetent scammer & then not getting eg pubic healthcare sorted, or simply allowing two terms max & possibly give voters more options by definition?
Technically an autocratic, unelected leader executing policies by public demand (voting, polling) can be more democratic than a system that elects leaders that then don’t execute the public will.(Is it really undemocratic that presidents of most countries can’t seek a third term??? Or is the system more democratic bcs of it, bcs the demos has to crat more? Ofc not to mention the obvious risk of abuse of power which grows with each day a politician is in power - which directly threatens democratic values by default.)
Also there isn’t really a core difference between setting a term limit to the president (of whatever) vs the term limit of representatives (of whatever). Yes the issues are more pronounced with the president, but not dissimilar.
It’s not like he went bad as a result of serving too many terms—he was a corrupt neoliberal from day one. Term limits aren’t a cure for that.
But if there was a limit, at least he would be in that position for only one or two terms
the doddering that comes with age is one problem and milquetoast neoliberalism is another. We can solve for the age one.
People say this all the time but honestly it’s not really true.
It makes sense for the executive - there is a lot of power concentrated in one human being.
But this guy was a rep - he’s one of 435. One of 535 if you count the senate. He doesn’t have a lot of individual power in that position and it can take a long time to build credibility and connections to be able to work in congress.
The House should be expanded like it was originally intended. Repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 that capped the limit at the current 435, in large part just because they didn’t want to expand the building. That in turn created a second defacto Senate, resulting in a lot of the current gerrymandering issues due to artificially limited district numbers.
If we removed that artificial limit and used the same proportions that were in place at the time there would now be 1200 representatives that represent equal districts across the board without any large or small outliers. Proper representation like the House was designed.
Any Congress can do this, the specific apportionment is not part of the constitution, it is like any other law. That act was passed by a regular Congressional act 100 years ago, and it can be undone just as easily.
Something like 120 in congress are over 70 years old, so over 20%.
bOtH pArTiEs are unwilling to fix this, that 20% are of course much more powerful than newer members. Maxine Waters, Mitch McConnell, and others are over 80; McConnell is visibly, horribly, embarrassingly impaired, and still in office. Maxine is 87 and is the modern incarnation of Smaug, sitting upon her immense treasure hoard.
Yet another humiliation for Americans… and they have the best healthcare insurance on Earth, while the lifespan of their own constituents falls.
Go ahead and vote, but I don’t think we can vote our way out of this and that change must be forced upon them by others.
John Roberts was 67 when his geriatric lapse rendered the 2024 election illegitimate and fraudulent.
79% of Americans want age caps.
Pilots are retired at 65 years old.
The unfolding geriatric catastrophe of the White House is enabled by Democratic Party failure to press the issue of age. Geriatrics with a stranglehold on party politics damned us to continued geriatric incompetence.
It follows that the only path to restoring the constitutional order is the immediate removal of all geriatric politicians at every level. Federal, State, Judiciary, Legislative, Executive. 100% gone.
It’s not difficult: “respect for elders” shouldn’t be a suicide pact.
79% of Americans say they want age caps for elected officials, but they keep voting for people older than those age caps, and that is the result that counts in the end.
The Democratic Party, which is a private institution not beholden to the electorate, has a seniority system for high ranking positions. The Republican Party doesn’t. I’m no fan of Republicans, but this should be understood by anyone trying to understand the situation.
If they represent public affairs, they should be beholden to the electorate. Fuck this hiding behind private institution bullshit.
Once it’s understood that geriatric politicians are a disease, the only thing that matters is removing geriatric politicians, regardless of party.
I don’t disagree, but I think it will be more difficult with the Democratic Party given the way the party is run.
Mine’s 82 and been in some sort of office since 1974, senator since ‘09. And he’s running again. I’m kinda surprised the MAGAts haven’t primaried him. He’s not anti-Trump, but also not really invested in the vision, more of a classic “good old boy” Republican.
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You’ll find that a lot of people here don’t care how old Sanders is (older than McConnell). It’s his turn.
I’m on record saying Sanders should retire.
He fought the good fight. The best thing he can do is to endorse someone young to take his place.
We need more young people to get into politics.
death is the new political retirement
