North Dakota voters just approved an age limit for congressional candidates

This is not really something written in the constitution, just something that the justices vividly hallucinated into existence in 95. If it actually comes up again, it'll probably be overturned.

Amend?

Benjiman Franklin was strongly vociferous on the constituition being barely sufficient until a despot showed up and trashed it.

Might be time for a rethink and reset of the election methods, terms, supreme court lifetime appointments, corporations as citizens, allowing lobbying, actually imprisoning | significantly firing corruption in politics, stronger seperation of arms of government, etc.

All that sounds like a great opportunity for a movement to get usurped by a dictator. That many huge changes all at once.

The US has been going strong for nearly 250 years with the same form of government. Who has gone longer? (Leaving out a few microstates and such). Ben Franklin was wrong.

Which isn’t to say we don’t need some change. To be honest most of what we need is better candidates and people more interested in subtlety and honest disagreements.

Given how many people are struggling to find enthusiasm to voice support for Biden due to the situation in Gaza and how he isn’t trying to play hardball with Netanyahu in comparison to the hardball Reagan played back in the day… there is a lot of negative sentiment for Biden due to his age and intransigence on many issues… from the outside looking in (I’m in Australia, so I don’t have a vote in this, I just care about the foreign policy implications) … the situation in the upcoming election is very much looking like a lot of people view it as “narcissistic nut job who seems extremely keen on fascism” and “old politician who might be getting just a little bit senile from time to time… but is also not doing enough to try and stop a genocide” … oh and and throwing your vote out for a third party candidate who literally had brain worms

This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”

A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…

As for the future when people might live longer…

again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…

why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.

And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.

Term limits are excellent because they avoid career politicians getting too comfortable and corrupt. It has nothing to do with age.