[tptacek]

If people want congressional term limits, they'll vote in representatives that promise to enact them. People don't want those term limits. They want to pick who they elect to congress for their districts, and they don't care what you think, and the Constitution was written to favor them, not you.

I'd prefer term limits too, but I don't think I can high-horse it.

Given the prevailing sentiment on HN, we should all be glad there's never been a national referendum on NSA surveillance. From local politics experience: people are generally pretty sanguine about surveillance!

[kryogen1c]

> I'd prefer term limits too

Fwiw, I used to think this until someone pointed me to a study about how short term limits increase reliance on outside sources like lobbyists. I don't remember the study so I can't link it, but it seems intuitively obvious. Can't become a subject matter expert in 4 years, and for sufficiently complicated jobs you're barely competent by then.

[vlovich123]

Sure. But if you have a large enough body and cap terms at 12 years or so, then the concern about experience is negated because there will always be enough experience in the body. The one paper everyone referenced is interesting but that study badly needs replication and verification before at just blindly assume there’s a there there. It was one state legislature which works quite differently from the federal government which typically has rules making agencies and other supports. After all, presidents get 4-8 years. Does this mean they’re so unable to do the job they outsource to contractors and lobbyists? To some extent maybe, but they also have staff and other sport resources.

It’s certainly possible to design term limits that avoid various pitfalls.

[kryogen1c]

> the concern about experience is negated because there will always be enough experience in the body

This is a circular argument. The concern about infinite term career politicians is non-accountability and entrenched institutional corruption. Saying "well the institution has its own inertia and will still function" doesn't solve the original problem.

> After all, presidents get 4-8 years. Does this mean they’re so unable to do the job they outsource

I mean... yes? Presidents have a huge sprawling infrastructure that supports them. If there's anything the back-to-back presidencies of Trump and biden has taught us, it's that the organization surrounding the office of President largely run things anyway (Trump because he was dangerously unhinged and biden because he's grossly mentally deficient).

In fact, if it wasn't for the wildly unconstitutional expansion of power in executive orders in the past two decades, Presidents would have even less impact than they do already.

> It’s certainly possible to design term limits that avoid various pitfalls.

I think term limits are an attempt to treat a symptoms, rather than a problem. Career politicians are dangerous because of legal outside influence. I think campaign finance is the right place to strike. Money, via ads and other means, shouldn't be able to influence elections.

[vlovich123]

> This is a circular argument. The concern about infinite term career politicians is non-accountability and entrenched institutional corruption. Saying "well the institution has its own inertia and will still function" doesn't solve the original problem.

I don't follow. The fact that you have a variety of politicians, some at the beginning and some at the end of their 12 year term, means you have a substantial non-0 amount of politicians that have sufficient experience to not be reliant on lobbyists (the main argument from that paper). The existence of term limits means that career politicians have to make very different career choices and legislative choices with respect to the law making they are trying to get done in that fixed window. It's not sufficient by itself without other reforms [1] but it's probably a necessary condition in terms of maintaining the health of our democracy.

> I mean... yes? Presidents have a huge sprawling infrastructure that supports them. If there's anything the back-to-back presidencies of Trump and biden has taught us, it's that the organization surrounding the office of President largely run things anyway (Trump because he was dangerously unhinged and biden because he's grossly mentally deficient).

And Bush 1 & 2, Obama & Clinton? Do you think a Representative's office doesn't run a lot of the day to day for them? Do you think a CEO doesn't have a lot of the same infrastructure? What exactly would you expect a President or any leader to do on their own? When has that ever been true? Not really sure what point you're trying to make.

> I think term limits are an attempt to treat a symptoms, rather than a problem. Career politicians are dangerous because of legal outside influence. I think campaign finance is the right place to strike. Money, via ads and other means, shouldn't be able to influence elections.

Term limits don't require a consistiutional amendment whereas your preferred place to strike requires either meaningfully changing the power balance of SCOTUS (which is fairly difficult) or a constitutional amendment to get around Citizen's united.

[1] Limiting when you can declare for office to within ~3-6 months before an election and having a black out period before electioneering are common steps many other sane democracies choose. It's not foolproof because you can have unofficial electioneering but it's a start. Limiting the representation so that you can only vote on certain things (police chiefs, AGs, school boards, judges, direct-to-citizen ballots like California & NY etc) are also things saner democracies avoid politicizing (+ an informed citizenry only has so much bandwidth - that's why we outsource representation). And also limiting election season so that it happens once every four years (i.e. you get city + state + federal representative every 4 years instead of elections every single year which results in very low turnout on the vast majority of elections and is extremely undemocratic). I'm aware a lot of these may be difficult to pass in the US and there can be real reasons that these exact proposals aren't the ones we'd want (and maybe constitutional concerns). But if we're already talking about changing the US constitution, these are probably easier reforms that would have more appeal. The fact that House members start campaigning for the next election at the conclusion of their current one and Senators start ~2 years after election means the vast majority of elected representatives are not actually focusing their time on what they've been elected to do.

[dctoedt]

My wife has long said, "we have term limits — they're called elections."

[throwaway675309]

Not for Supreme Court justices you don't.

[idlewords]

Sure we do; they serve one term.

[throwaway675309]

That's what advisers are for. If anything, having definitive term limits gives former representatives an alternative career path in this form as well.

[StanislavPetrov]

>If people want congressional term limits, they'll vote in representatives that promise to enact them.

This presupposes both that the system is representative of the will of the people and that people act rationally in their own self-interest, both of which are provably false. For example, 88% of Americans think Marijuana should be legal federally, both medical and recreational marijuana. Overwhelming majorities have held this view for years. Did they vote in representatives that promised to enact them? And this is on an issue where 88% of Americans agree. Rarely will you get such widespread agreement by Americans on any issue.

This isn't to say that people actually want term limits, that's an entirely separate debate, only that the fact that term limits haven't been implemented is no barometer for that.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/22/americans-o...

[tptacek]

They did not vote in legalization representatives, because the issue had very little salience in elections. Even when serious pollsters run issue polls (many highly-publicized polls are commissioned by advocacy groups, and their outcomes are a foregone conclusion), the poll generally measures the issue in a vacuum, but doesn't come close to assessing what people will actually motivate people to vote.

[sobkas]

> If people want congressional term limits, they'll vote in representatives that promise to enact them.

And then they'll pull WWE and designate on or two manchinns or sinemas to oppose it so they can say that they tried but failed. And they will blame voters for not voting harder.

Or do nothing and hope people will forget about it.

[tptacek]

It's fun to pretend there's a vast conspiracy in between you and your policy goals, but usually what's really happening is that most people don't care about your particular policy objectives. Nobody cares about term limits. There are opinion polls that say otherwise, but they're not measuring the salience of the issue. People have a stated (bullshit) preference, and then the preference they reveal when they reelect Chuck Grassley for the 9th time.

[pksebben]

you're wrong.

while "conspiracy" isn't precisely correct, the system has been architected, bit by bit, to get between the zeitgeist of public opinion and policy. I've had to explain this to so many folks that as of this posting, I'm saving the list in a note for quicker reference.

- gerrymandering: even if your opinion is part of the majority opinion, that may not matter because you might live in a place that's strategically districted to silence you[1]

- first-past-the-post [2]: this system of voting creates an environment hostile to all but two courses of action. Consequently, issues that are highly nuanced or divided along more than one line are conveniently wrapped up in...

- the two party system: if my choices are eat the turd sandwich or drink the giant bag of douche, you haven't given me a choice. All the more shame that my choices are defined by:

- the DNC / the RNC: neither of which is held accountable to the kind of transparency that "actual voting" is (never mind that, because of the issues previously mentioned, they do run the "actual voting"). And by bifurcating the voting bloc on either side of a strategic line, they make life a lot easier for..

- lobbyists: I can't stress enough how bad it is that these motherfuckers write things that make it into actual law [3]. This is the man behind the curtain, the curtain being..

- representatives: see previous as to why this nomenclature is a joke. Not that it would make a ton of difference if it weren't, because even if they did represent your interests (pro tip: they don't), they'd only rarely be able to act on it, because of:

- the Senate: do you live in Wyoming? Vermont? no? well those folks get to decide to kill bills from the rest of us. Even if they decide not to, and everything else works fine, guess what -

- the supreme court: may be staffed by a majority that was voted in generations ago and they're a) not leaving and b) desperately out of touch, so all the work you may it may not have accomplished by overcoming ALL THE STUFF ABOVE is moot!

.. and I've left out tons from this brief overview. The money / campaign finance cycle, the relationship of all this to the media, voter suppression, and so on and so on and so on. Another way to look at this, rather than a systemic analysis, is to look at the outcome, which has been done [4]. Generally, what is seen is that the more money you have, the more congruent your opinion and enacted policy will be. Notably, it's what doesn't get passed that the wealthy seem to have the most control over. This would make sense, because things are obviously working well for them now so why rock the boat.

1 https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerr...

2 https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

3 https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

4 https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20...

[tptacek]

How's explaining this been working out for you?

The people in Wyoming and Vermont aren't too happy about Chicagoans deciding things for them, either.

[pksebben]

it works out just about as well as people are willing to think about it.

The point about the Senate is that it's asymmetric representation. The Senate kills bills, and it can be done with a much smaller portion of the voting bloc than is representative.

[kneebonian]

John Hunstman ran on the promise of term limits. He recently finished his term as the longest serving member of the Senate in history.

Maybe their all just slimy eels that can't be trusted.

[tptacek]

John Huntsman Jr, the Utahn, ambassador to China, &c? He never served in the Senate, and neither did his father. Which Huntsman are you referring to?

[kneebonian]

You are 100% correct I meant Orrin Hatch, Utahs senator.

[idlewords]

Hatch is only the seventh longest-serving senator:

https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm

[hulitu]

> people are generally pretty sanguine about surveillance!

"think about the children".