The Double Edged Sword of Term Limits

[TheOneX]

Term limits are often purported to be the cure for career politicians in Congress. While this is true, it also has the unfortunate side effect of removing good politicians. So I want to make a proposal that tries to balance the pros and cons of term limits. I would do this by codifying the concept of the House being the lower chamber and the Senate being the upper chamber by turning the House into the junior chamber and the Senate into the senior chamber.

The proposals would be:
1. The House would have a 5 non-consecutive term limit. For most politicians this would give them a 10 year lifespan.
2. The Senate would not have any term limits, but would have an additional requirement that one must serve at least 3 terms in the House before being eligible for the Senate.
3. Increase the number of Senators per state to 3 so there is always at least one senator up for election every election in every state.

This would hopeful cause the House to serve as a filter for the Senate where only those who prove themselves worthy of staying in politics can stay in politics. Those who do not get filtered out after a decade. This allows for a balance between getting new faces into Congress, while also not just automatically throwing away valuable experienced statesmen arbitrarily.

The only purpose of bumping the number of senators per state to 3 is so when a representative hits the 5 year term limit they can carry any notoriety they earned straight into a Senate election. Otherwise a 2 year gap might result in a representative who would have defeated an incumbent senator losing for various possible reasons. I consider that to be less than ideal.

My Counter Argument:
To counter this idea with having term limits for both chambers of Congress would be that these ex-representatives and ex-senators would then be forced to join their state legislative if they want to continue their careers as politicians. This could have the fortunate side-effect of increasing the power of the states as politicians may start to see serving at the national level as temporary effort to gain influence at the state level.

My Counter Counter Argument:
After getting to the national level these politicians would not use their gained notoriety to increase their influence in state politics, but would use it for a speaking career or to become a lobbyist, thus they would not care anymore than they currently do about increasing state power.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Name 3 ‘good politicians’.

[The Conservative]

Name 3 ‘good politicians’.

All of them are dead.

[TheOneX]

Name 3 ‘good politicians’.

Rand Paul is pretty good.
I do not know too much about him yet, but Josh Hawley has impressed me so far.

That is all I got, but I do not really see that as a valid critique of my brainstorm.

[Martin Hash]

3) Dan Crenshaw.

[SuburbanFarmer]

My point is that I see no value in your argument to ‘keep the good ones’. There aren’t enough of them to matter.

[TheOneX]

My point is that I see no value in your argument to ‘keep the good ones’. There aren’t enough of them to matter.

Ah I see, in that case I think you are taking my phrasing too literally. The only way to guarantee the subjective good ones that we personally approve of would be to personally dictate who is represented.

In this context the good ones would simply be the ones who can out compete others to be elected. The idea is to create more competition. I hope that increased competition would result in more representatives that you and I think are good, but there is no way to guarantee that when you use popular elections to choose your representative. So instead you have to create a system that hopefully promotes the right people.

[Martin Hash]

Elections are won by whoever has the biggest constituency. So you have to belong to a large church, or some other dependable voting block. Your resume is immaterial.

Also, your imagination of what a campaign is like is nothing like the reality; you think it’s about the candidate but it’s really about the Party. Partys have a lot of expenses and make most of their money exploiting money out of naive, narcissistic, first-time candidates. The Party’s attach huge costs to the campaign which the candidate is expected to pay for: managers, voting software, organization efforts, offices, the list is long. It costs $100K for nothing, even before promotional costs. Nobody wins the 1st time they run, so the system embarrasses & bankrupts an endless stream of hopeful but futile once-and-outers.

[Haumana]

Elections are won by whoever has the biggest constituency. So you have to belong to a large church, or some other dependable voting block. Your resume is immaterial.

Also, your imagination of what a campaign is like is nothing like the reality; you think it’s about the candidate but it’s really about the Party. Partys have a lot of expenses and make most of their money exploiting money out of naive, narcissistic, first-time candidates. The Party’s attach huge costs to the campaign which the candidate is expected to pay for: managers, voting software, organization efforts, offices, the list is long. It costs $100K for nothing, even before promotional costs. Nobody wins the 1st time they run, so the system embarrasses & bankrupts an endless stream of hopeful but futile once-and-outers.

It also allows for a lot of grift, not sure about the bankrupt part but a lot of donors see their money just fade away. "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion." - L Ron Hubbard.

How else are turds like Pelosi and Waters getting elected, if religion isn't involved?

[SuburbanFarmer]

From what I hear, it’s all about the candidates’ fundraising ability. New congressmen are expected to spend most of the day in a phone bank begging for donations.