• EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    People who are politicians for life have incentives to not be corrupt since it can end their career.

    No offense, this is an incredibly naive take that is easily disproven by the current US president and the decades of documented corruption he’s practiced in the open that did done nothing to falter his career. He has 34 felonies. He was going to trial for the largest breach of US intelligence in the history of our country.

    He was then elected president anyway.

    Social media has made the concept of political accountability into an impossibility. Any “career-ending” behavior can just be lied about on social media, turned into a firehouse of disinfo, then bots & supporters eat it up.

    Without term limits, people just need to be popular enough to get elected once - then they can use their position for personal gain for as long as they can lie about it in some way. (Forever with AI now).

    I could gesture in any direction in the world and end up pointing to a country this is happening to right now.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      And there are politicians that for nailed for it. Heard of George Santos?

      Only one guy can become president and shrug off the charges

      • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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        28 minutes ago

        Future pardoned Republican conman George Santos? I have heard of him. Looking forward to him getting pardoned in the next 3 years now that his sentencing has been completed in April 2025.

        I’ll bet money he’s jail free by 2026, and then somehow involved in this current admin.

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Term limits ensures that you always have a new incompetence congress finding their footing before being replaced by new newbies forever out of step.

      Also it can simultaneously be true that term limits increase corruption and we at present are fully incapable of reigning in corruption of any kind because we are bad immoral people on average. Your position is like arguing that cigs don’t kill you because your presently already dying of liver cancer right now.

      • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        Your position is like arguing that cigs don’t kill you because your presently already dying of liver cancer right now.

        Nope. My position is quite literally that we should limit the amount of cigarettes we smoke so we don’t develop cancer.

        Maybe a pack a week?

        Or a single 12 year term for each Supreme Court justice?

        As proof I’ve simply pointed to how we have completely failed to limit terms in the Supreme Court and now very much have fascist cancer because of it. (Supreme Court going full MAGA and ignoring due process).

        You are making this much harder to understand than it needs to be.

        • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Again you confuse cause and effect term limits could have easily meant justices losing their seats during Bush and Trump bringing about the same effect or worse. If we had gotten luckier or smarter with strategic resignation we could be talking about lifetime appointments keeping the judiciary independent from the president and protecting democracy.

          If the people coming in are corrupt getting new corrupt people every term limit isn’t going to make them less corrupt. It is the fact that lawmakers are so beholden to money to get and stay in office that leads to corruption in the first place. In your alternative America a lawmaker would be expecting to need somewhere to land after they hit the limit and would be more beholden to industry not less.

          Wherein we successfully elect people who aren’t beholden to money we needn’t kick them out right after they learn the ropes if the people keep showing their confidence in them by voting them in.

          • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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            2 minutes ago

            Again you confuse cause and effect…

            My friend. I am not confusing anything. However, you are very much confusing reality with fantasy and arguing as if that fantasy is real.

            … term limits could have easily meant justices losing their seats during Bush and Trump bringing about the same effect or worse.

            This is a hypothetical. You are arguing as if it is real. It is not. I could just as easily assume the opposite would be true. That term limits would have completely prevented this current situation of a 6-3 court. Because it unquestionably would have if the terms were short enough. So even if we were talking about theoreticals here, your outcome is much less likely and shouldn’t be assumed as true.

            If we had gotten luckier or smarter with strategic resignation…

            Again. Another hypothetical to explain a clear shortcoming with a lack of term limits. We weren’t lucky. At all.

            Your comment is more an insight into how you are personally coping with what a lack of term limits have done to this country rather than a debate over their necessity.

            I mean honestly, I think you are basically dillusional if you can’t agree that the current Supreme Court has corruption there for life - and the only fix to prevent that happening is term limits.

            we could be talking about lifetime appointments keeping the judiciary independent from the president and protecting democracy.

            Literally this has now been proven to not work with lifetime appointments. Cause and effect has lead us to lifetime appointed judges working towards the interest of themselves rather than the people. We live in an absolutley unquestionable reality where lifetime appointments to the judiciary have directly caused that judiciary to no longer be Independant from the President. They literally ruled for Trump to be King while Biden was still in office ffs.

            If you want to talk about cause and effect, how about we start in reality - do you think term limits would fix the current SC?