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Bernie Sanders to run for fourth term in US Senate
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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He seems like a genuinely good person, but term limits should be a thing. A person should not own a Senate seat for 20-40 years because the locals are lazy and vote in incumbents by default. It doesn't matter if it's McConnell or Sanders, Senators should have two term limit. I don't care how principled he is, 82 is too fucking old. Retire and hand the reigns over to someone else.
Characterizing the voters as "lazy" is really failing to understand how bad legislators stay in office. We need to reform our electoral systems to make legislators more accountable to democratic oversight, not impose arbitrary limits that take the power away from the voters.
With term limits, the Congress would lose institutional knowledge. When a new member of Congress came in, they would only have lobbyists to give them introductions, teach them the ropes. Legislation is a difficult job that requires professionals, not just a bunch of newbies. We would be absolutely signing over the Congress to complete corporate control.
More democracy is better.
Less democracy is worse.
12 years is plenty of time to have institutional knowledge, and legislators could always just hire past senators as advisors. This is a bad argument and I don't know why it gets repeated. Lobbyists invest in relationships with officials and don't want to have to start fresh, that's why they invest money against term limits.
https://www.termlimits.com/myth-busting-101-lobbyists-love-term-limits/
So I did some digging... USTL is one of several shady, fake-grass-roots organizations operated by Howard Rich, a wealthy libertarian, and funded by his collection of wealthy libertarian friends, who clearly want to reduce the effectiveness of government, and make it more susceptible to their influence. The lobbyists investigated the lobbyists and found that they don't support the thing they are saying you should support.
If you look deeper at the specific bills highlighted in that article, neither one is about term-limits versus no-term-limits. They're both about restructuring existing term limits. We had a similar ballot measure where I live. It's a fairly complicated issue, and not a good example.
Perhaps the most famous term limit in the US is the Presidential one, imposed because FDR was doing too many good things. By actually doing things to help people, he had become insanely popular, and won a fourth term - democratically, because the voting citizens approved of his actions, as it's supposed to work. That's when the corrupt capitalist wing of Congress decided to put a limit on democracy, and honestly, that might be one of the most significant "beginning of the downfall" moments we can point to in US history.
Another big supporter of term limits is the Heritage Foundation. If you can judge somebody by the friends they keep, how about legislation? It's always the right pushing for this idea.
There's a lot, and I mean a whole lot, we should be doing to reduce the influence of money on politics. Fully publicly funded elections; banning many current shady lobbying practices; improving our electoral systems to be more democratic; making it illegal for legislators to take bribes, no matter how subtle. Lots. But taking the choice away from the voters is not a good option. It's a generally good rule of thumb: if your solution to a problem is to reduce democracy, you've got the wrong solution.
EDIT to add: https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-term-limits-turn-legislatures-6b2
I'll grant the California bill wasn't really about instituting term limits and the source is likely worthy of scrutiny. But the Arkansas bill is plainly about increasing term limits and it sure looks like there were a lot of non-individual entities giving in support of it. I can believe the National Education Association is doing it for liberal civics reasons, but I'm pretty skeptical the Arkansas Farm Bureau and Entergy Corp just really believe in disempowering lobbying.
What a wild way to describe codifying a longstanding tradition against a consolidated and calcified executive instead of relying on unwritten rules. The capitalists didn't invent term limits to stop FDR. They existed as a de facto custom since George Washington stepped down (and he was right to do so). Most heads of state have term limits and when they're bypassing them it's practically always a step towards authoritarianism not because they're just too important a leader.
Oh please. These aren't a limited pool of uber-men with unique ideas and unique abilities we're denying the public. For every Bernie Sanders there's 10 absolutely corrupt train wrecks who DON'T get voted out. We're a nation of 330 million people, we don't need to believe our senators are precious unicorns who would be stolen away from the voters because they've been ruling the country for over a decade.
There are some very good arguments against term limits, namely that lame-duck terms have no accountability and encourage "what's next" influence trading, but this idea that DEMOCRACY is being reduced if we eliminate a single option every decade is complete great-man garbage.
This is largely bullshit. It's hard because the people with 30 years made it hard for new people. Congress can change their own rules and make it easier. They already have legislative aids and lawyers that handle the minutiae of writing the laws.
It's also far more likely that the corporate lobbyist is influencing the senator they've known for 30 years more than the one that showed up yesterday. States have term limits and it doesn't make them slaves to lobbyists.
Stop shilling for the status quo.
Shilling for the status quo? I've got a whole laundry list of changes I'd love to make, some much more significant than term limits, to make legislatures more responsive to democratic oversight. Please see my response to Zaktor for just a few.
There's this claim, probably kinda BS, that it takes ten years of practice to get really good at something. I'm always suspicious of nice neat numbers like that. But I think it gets repeated a lot because, ultimately, anybody who has become an expert at something kinda squints at it and says "yeah that sounds maybe right" - because it's close enough, it's on the right order of magnitude. Expertise takes time. Laws are complicated. If you have a twelve year term limit, and become an expert at year ten, you get two years to do something about it - but only a small fraction of the legislative body left has your level of expertise to work with you.
Always demand more democracy, never less.
Legislators don't write the physical laws they vote on. At best the decide some key points or suggest ideas. They have people with that expertise that actually do the writing, not just lobbyists. The sole purpose of representatives is to represent their constituency, which they get worse at as time goes on.