alt Hacker News> Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world.
Guaranteeing they never get good at their job, and institutional knowledge keeps decaying.
We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills. I think to be a Congressperson you have to go to specific trade school--let's call it Congress U--graduate with high honors, serve in some other government capacity, and your grades are public record. Only then are you qualified to even run for election.
Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things. Heck, we don't even let random firebrands install electricity.
Replies
I am completely sympathetic to your motivations here. However, it seems like if you take that approach, where many qualifications are required before you are “eligible” to hold elected office, it’s much closer to an aristocracy than a republic or a democracy. Unelected elites who control the special university and those who set the eligibility rules in general hold and safeguard the real power, allowing trusted insiders to ascend to power and burying those with unorthodox ideas or worrying populist notions. It’s an anti-democratic idea.
It probably, on net, increases the power of elites and decreases the power of ordinary people, which increases the already extreme tilt in that direction. Like with a lot of things, it depends on the virtue of the elites in question whether this is a great idea or a catastrophic and oppressive one. As we can see, our current elites are so shameless they blatantly trade on privileged knowledge and can’t even manage to pass a budget for the country.
In general when one looks at the longest serving politicians, it seems to reek much more of extremes of corruption than skill. The insider trading this article references being but one aspect of that. It also correlates with people turning into warmongers, but that's probably just another angle to corruption since there's a rich and ridiculously unaccountable flow of money in military related stuff.
For another datum consider presidents' second term. This is often where they are supposed to be able to really act out their vision for the future since they're ostensibly out of politics after this and have at least 4 years of experience at the highest level, yet they almost invariably tend to be extremely underwhelming.
I'm not arguing there is no skill, but I am arguing that just spending a lot of time in office doesn't seem to correlate much with achieving that skill.
> Guaranteeing [that congressional lawmakers] never get good at their job
I don't know if you've been paying much attention to US politics since the year 2000 but the vast majority of them are no good at their job regardless of how long they've been there.
> We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills.
I don't think anyone does? But currently the only real skills you need for attaining high US office are 1) be rich and/or have enough rich people in your phone book or 2) the ability to make Donald Trump feel like a special boy.
> Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things.
waves in US/UK/Argentina/Brazilian politics over the last decade
Disagree. The main motivation for serving in Congress should be just that - service to the country. Not personal power building, not a career. The actual process, writing bills, parliamentary procedure, is all managed by staff anyway. The representative or senator is mainly the face of the office and should be mostly talking with constituents and not buried in policy.
If there's one qualification test I would possibly support it would to pass a high school AP US History exam.