[roenxi]

> So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals

Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to learn from their mistakes. In almost all cases people's political solution is just "well we didn't try my idea hard enough" and increasing their tenure in office doesn't really help the overall situation.

[AnthonyMouse]

The interesting middle ground might be to prohibit anyone from serving more than two contiguous terms in the Senate or four in the House. Then if you've done your two terms in the Senate, you can run for a House seat, do three terms there and then your old Senate seat is back up for reelection. Except your old Senate seat now has a new incumbent who is only on their first term and you're running as the challenger. Meanwhile there are more seats in the House than the Senate, so if you hit your limit in the House you could go work for an administrative agency or run for a state-level office for two years and then come back, but then you're the challenger again.

The result is that you can stay as long as people keep voting you back in, but you lose the incumbency advantage and end up with a higher turnover rate without ending up with a 100% turnover rate. And you make them learn how other parts of the government work. It wouldn't hurt a bit to see long-term members of Congress do a two-year stint in an administrative agency once in a while.

[aldonius]

Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.

I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.

The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.

[DrJokepu]

>The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.

I’m not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but I’m going to challenge the notion that this etymological connection carries meaning. The word comes from Roman Senate, and in that context in Latin “senior” really meant people with higher status rather than age. Latin is full of these weird double meanings. Compare to seigneur in French or señor in Spanish. Also, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.

[abustamam]

Yeah, many words are literally divorced from their etymological root. Literally ;)

[Darrengineer]

I know this is eight days later, but I just want to give sincere applause to this comment. I think this is the first time I've seen 'literally' used in what can be described as "correctly" (i.e., in line with the etymological root).

All those using it to mean 'factually' are out there making a farce of the language. A farce!

[petejodo]

Or incumbents have to win some larger percentage of the vote in order to win over time

[mh-]

This is an interesting idea. Would be curious to hear from someone who thinks this is a bad idea (why).

edit: I see the "term limits are anti-democratic" takes elsewhere in the comments, so I guess let me narrow the above ask to "someone who isn't opposed to term limits, but thinks this idea is flawed."

[6510]

Fill the arena with HR ladies and have them do a battle royal to produce a half decent set of interview questions.

Put the electables in isolation cells fromwhere they one by one end up on the Tee Vee, give voters an app with AYE, NEY and Uhh? The questions are red by the winning HR lady but also appear on the app.

The applicant writes the fizzbuzz etc etc

Then, after the job interview, we give the job to the most satisfying candidate!

It's not necessary but I would also add a series of certificates and diplomas for the voter to show they actually have some kind of idea what the job involves. The level 1 certificate should be supper simple and easy to create. It will grant you 0.1 extra vote power. There could be as many levels as we want but to grow beyond [say] 50 votes should require a mythical effort impossible to attain for 99% while we aim to reserve the right to cast 5000 votes for 1 to 5 people with supper human abilities.

The top 20 should have to explain their AYE's and their NAY's to the Tee Vee audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHm6FsgJM8

[terminalshort]

Fill the arena with all the HR ladies, and then feed the winner to a lion. After that you might actually find someone capable of interviewing an applicant.

[jfengel]

The Senate is wildly unpopular, but individual Senators get re-elected overwhelmingly. The problem is always other people's Senators.

Everyone would like to term limit other people's politicians but they like experience for their own. The length of terms can't resolve that one way or the other.

With the Supreme Court we tried eliminating terms altogether, in the hopes that it would give people a chance to bond away from the necessity of appealing to the public. That just pushed the problem back to getting the most ideologically committed judges on the bench... through the Senators.

I haven't heard any structural solution to the problem of Americans just not liking each other.

[SllX]

Bold of you to assume any aspect of the California State legislature is visible enough to be more or less popular. People at least pay attention to what the US Senate does, and you know that no matter how the next election goes, the US Senate as one body is unlikely to go very far off the deep end in one direction or the other.