[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.