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He seems like a genuinely good person, but term limits should be a thing. A person should not own a Senate seat for 20-40 years because the locals are lazy and vote in incumbents by default. It doesn't matter if it's McConnell or Sanders, Senators should have two term limit. I don't care how principled he is, 82 is too fucking old. Retire and hand the reigns over to someone else.
Characterizing the voters as "lazy" is really failing to understand how bad legislators stay in office. We need to reform our electoral systems to make legislators more accountable to democratic oversight, not impose arbitrary limits that take the power away from the voters.
With term limits, the Congress would lose institutional knowledge. When a new member of Congress came in, they would only have lobbyists to give them introductions, teach them the ropes. Legislation is a difficult job that requires professionals, not just a bunch of newbies. We would be absolutely signing over the Congress to complete corporate control.
More democracy is better.
Less democracy is worse.
This is largely bullshit. It's hard because the people with 30 years made it hard for new people. Congress can change their own rules and make it easier. They already have legislative aids and lawyers that handle the minutiae of writing the laws.
It's also far more likely that the corporate lobbyist is influencing the senator they've known for 30 years more than the one that showed up yesterday. States have term limits and it doesn't make them slaves to lobbyists.
Stop shilling for the status quo.
Shilling for the status quo? I've got a whole laundry list of changes I'd love to make, some much more significant than term limits, to make legislatures more responsive to democratic oversight. Please see my response to Zaktor for just a few.
There's this claim, probably kinda BS, that it takes ten years of practice to get really good at something. I'm always suspicious of nice neat numbers like that. But I think it gets repeated a lot because, ultimately, anybody who has become an expert at something kinda squints at it and says "yeah that sounds maybe right" - because it's close enough, it's on the right order of magnitude. Expertise takes time. Laws are complicated. If you have a twelve year term limit, and become an expert at year ten, you get two years to do something about it - but only a small fraction of the legislative body left has your level of expertise to work with you.
Always demand more democracy, never less.
Legislators don't write the physical laws they vote on. At best the decide some key points or suggest ideas. They have people with that expertise that actually do the writing, not just lobbyists. The sole purpose of representatives is to represent their constituency, which they get worse at as time goes on.