surely someone that, on balance, did more good than ill? and how many of us can say that?
Dianne Feinstein has died
131–140 of 377 posts
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#132Having seen Diane bootlick for the telecoms most of my life, good riddance. Yes, you heard me. I am not even going to pause for a condolance or bite my tongue. I'm glad she's gone. She was 100% unfit for the position in the last few years of her life and nothing was done about it. This is a problem with US Politics, they are too fucking old to represent the actual population so they are pulled by SIGs and lobbyists.…
Term or age limits don't fix corporate and media capture. It doesn't matter who gets her seat, they are still going to vote party line and so will you.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#133So sad to lose such a great stock trader! - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/as-feinstein... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra... - https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/14/dianne-feinstein-hu... etc.
Dubious congress trades aside, congresspeople should not die of old age serving. There is something wrong with people like Byrd and Feinstein dying while serving. Even without term limits they should have the decency to know when to call it quits and not become a figurehead where most of the work they’re entrusted with is done behind the scenes by others —none of this bullshit whispering in their ear on how to vote.…
We should seriously consider mandatory retirement ages for all high public offices. We have them in the Foreign Service, and of course it would be bad for a diplomat to be in mental decline while negotiating a complex treaty. Multiple states have retirement ages for judges. The work of a senator or federal judge should be similarly protected from disruption due to the predictable age-related decline of individual office holders.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#134I know it’s rude to say negative things about a person who has just passed, but I can’t help feeling happy that such an influential Senate seat will finally go to someone that’s not over 70 (hopefully). There should be age limits for public office and it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be. We have too many dusty old codgers running things and ruining things, clawing at power and money while de…
> it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be.
That would create wrong incentives for pushing the retirement age upwards though.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#135She was mentally unfit to serve for the last couple years. It was a travesty many countries seem to have no mental bar required to serve or even reasonable age limits (Feinstein was 90!) Any decision "she" was made in the last couple years was made by her aids and not her. This is not how democracy is supposed to work. Details: > Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffer…
She held a position of incredible importance (chair of the senate judiciary committee). Her leaving would cause a stalemate and block all judicial nominations.
That's a fact, not a guess.
She should have left, but the reason she didn't should be happening either.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#136Ok, I think in light of this she should really consider stepping down.
She’s a strong advocate for the democrat process and will continue to serve her term.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#137I know the easy approach here is for people to want an age limit in Congress, but I've always been more partial to a term limit. I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
Term limits are just a mechanism to transfer power to un-elected officials and lobbyists, and to make sure any decent politicians are kicked out before they can have any lasting impact. Imagine working at a job where there were rules that forced your company to lay off all the most experienced folks after a few years. Sounds miserable to me.
How do you feel about the US presidency in that case?
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#138She was mentally unfit to serve for the last couple years. It was a travesty many countries seem to have no mental bar required to serve or even reasonable age limits (Feinstein was 90!) Any decision "she" was made in the last couple years was made by her aids and not her. This is not how democracy is supposed to work. Details: > Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffer…
It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.
Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality.
Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws.
[0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html
[1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count...
[3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.
I'd rather see a proportional system.
Ranked voting for single offices (president, governor, etc), and proportional for any representative body, like the House and Senate.
Or, if the Senate is really meant to represent the states rather than the people, it should only be concerned with state issues: which issues belong at the federal level, and which at the state level, for example.
Re: Dianne Feinstein has died
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The governor of California can turn around an interim appointment pretty quickly if he so chooses; there's some static around a prior promise to appoint a Black woman, which most people viewed as effectively a promise to Representative Barbara Lee. She has since declared candidacy for that Senate seat--as Feinstein was not going to run for re-election--and Newsom (understandably, IMO) doesn't want to hand the keys to…
> doesn't want to hand the keys to a running candidate, out of fairness to the also-quite-reasonable alternate candidates Is that something he has actually said?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/gavin-newsom-...
> “Yes. Interim appointment. I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” Newsom said. “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats that have worked their tail off. That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”