Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell struck up a friendship during their nearly quarter-century in the Senate together. Now in their 80s, the Democratic president and the Senate GOP leader appear to be giving political cover to each other as they fend off questions about their advanced age and health issues.
Notably, McConnell, R-Ky., 81, hasn’t joined Donald Trump, 77, and other Republicans who have attacked Biden’s age, health and mental acuity as he seeks re-election.
And after McConnell’s second freeze-up last week, Biden was one of the first to call McConnell, telling reporters that his “friend” sounded like “his old self” and that such episodes are a “part of his recovery” from a fall and a concussion this year.
More than anything I just hope this could get the US term limits. If an older person gets elected so be it, but let’s get rid of people serving in Congress for 20+ years. Two terms Senate, two House gets you twenty years, that is long enough and follows the existing model with the Presidency.
Amen to that.
There’s a few good dynasty reps, but for every one good one it seems like there’s 4-5 bad ones.
Being a representative is not supposed to be a career job. You can’t represent the people if you haven’t been one of the people for 20+ years and you have no idea what life in your district is actually like.
Plus there’s a natural predisposition to re-elect incumbents. Thus you get dinosaurs like McConnell and Pelosi who both should be in nursing homes but they stick around because they have seniority. These people are not doing a good job of representing the will of their constituents, if only because it’s been longer than anyone can remember since they’ve been one of those constituents.
This exactly. This is at the heart of so much of the corruption. Someone in public service shouldn’t be able to make it a life time appointment and come out 100s of millions in net worth.
Bought and sold by corp interest all along the way. It becomes a lot harder to purchase power when there’s a regular rotation of new people every 4-8 years
You make a good point- along with term limits there has to be something to prevent a revolving door of people going between government regulating industry and the industry they regulate. An insider trading law for Congress is a good start- if not requiring investments to go into a blind trust, to at least require Congress representatives and spouse to publicly declare all holdings and trades so insider trading would be obvious.
I’d really like to make elections publicly funded though. Get the money out of Washington.
And while we’re at it, let’s reform primaries by removing them entirely. Let anyone with some number of petition signatures get on the main ballot, and use ranked choice voting so you can vote ‘for’ the best guy without losing your vote ‘against’ the worst guy. Then we might actually get some GOOD politicians.
Fundamentally disagree. You are just opening the system to cheaper bribery. Senators like Bernie Sanders would be thrown out even when he has one of the highest approval ratings by his constituents. Term limits do nothing for congress but make said congress people look for their next opportunity after the gig (which is already a problem). Its on voters to make sure candidates like Mitch McConnell or Dianne Feinstein get replaced. The call for term limits is just change for change without any thought on its possible effects. You may ask why do I have this double standard for congress but not the president? The simple answer is there are 100 senators and 435 House Representatives, most people barely fucking know who their senators/reps are but you are just making for a revolving door to disincentivize even caring about them now since eh they are going to disappear in a couple years anyway, the power difference between being the sole power of a branch of government vs being merely a member with either 1/100 or 1/435 the power of the body changes things since congress is far more a collective than any of the other branches.