this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
537 points (96.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43945 readers
623 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 6 months ago

Term limits have been shown to create ‘brain drain’, and ultimately what winds up happening is that that legislators must focus on career growth - either spending their time in office campaigning for the next elected position, or looking to opportunities beyond politics. It takes time and experience to become skilled in crafting bills that don’t have adverse effects and cannot be overturned or lawyered to do things they aren’t intended to do.
The net result is that it creates a slew of amateur legislators, and professional lobbyists, as legislators are forced to retire just as they become skilled at the job.

An alternative to a retirement age is mental/physical fitness reviews, but that’s also tricky. If there isn’t a defined process then unscrupulous people will just use a doctor of choice to get the results they want, but if there is a process, politicizing that process to serve one party or the other could mean using mandatory retirement to force key vacancies.

I do think that at some point we need to pry the hands of people off the levers of power, and I can’t think of a way that is as ‘non-corruptible’ as a set age limit. It would not always be personally fair, but it would probably be for the greater good.