The astonishing thing about this is that there isn’t even a requirement for senators to have served in government for a certain time before. It is common for people who don’t know anything about municipal, state, or federal governance and who have been lawyers, business owners, or financial advisors their entire lives to become senators right away, without first being a civil servant or at least serving in the house of representatives. In terms of merit, you could take random 18-year-olds from the street and have them fill all the senate seats, and in fact they’d most certainly do a better job representing the interests of the majority of US Americans.

I feel the problem is less the age of the senator (or representative) and more so how they have no term limits. Why do we have people serving 30, 40, 50+ years?

The longer they serve, the more likely they are to take bribes lobbyist money and donations from people that don’t represent their constituents.

I can understand the argument of wanting knowledgeable and experienced congressmen, but there has to be a limit when their net worth is way more than their salaries.

Yeah, the US has some penchant for electing really antique people. Chuds love to bash Biden for being old, but Trump is only three years younger than him.

Like Parenti said, they’ll be in until 2030-2040. We don’t even have to actively remove them from office. We just have to wait.

It would be interesting to add skin color to this.

can we just set the cutoff at 60 please?

I don’t really care how old someone is as long as they have control of their mental faculties and they continue to serve the people. But obviously in a capitalist country as the USA that isn’t the case. Same thing with term limits, if they continue to do their job well I don’t care. Obviously I’m speaking about socialist countries though so if a person like Xi (who’s 70) continues doing a good job I’m all for them continuing being in their position.

what the fuck is the y-axis on this image