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The new measure bans people from running for a House or Senate seat in North Dakota "if that person could attain 81 years of age by December 31st of the year immediately preceding the end of the term."
I know this is for congressional seats, but Biden will be 81 this November and Trump will be 78. Seems like such a coincidental age to pick red state...
Neither is running for house or senate
If it applied to President, it would include Trump, unless I'm reading it wrong. Trump just turned 78, he will turn 81 in 2027, the year prior to the end of the term for which he'd be running.
Is this constitutional?
Also, can't people just not vote for someone they think is too old?
I don't see why not? I can't run for president at 31. Additionally, it is up to each state to define how its elections are held, and that's delineated in the constitution as well.
The minimum age requirements are in the Constitution, so it would be hard to challenge them. There's nothing about a maximum age.
On the other hand, the supreme Court very recently ruled that Colorado couldn't keep Trump off the ballot in that state.
At the very least, this seems wide open to be legally challenged.
There is no limitation on length of age in the constitution. In order to change that, a constitutional amendment is needed. A state cannot decide. It is plainly unconstitutional.
It absolutely is. States are granted the right to send representatives to Congress in pretty much any way they see fit.
Historically states can run their own elections, but just recently the supreme Court jumped in to say Colorado couldn't keep an insurrectionist from running for president.
A president is not a congressman.
That's true and it's been a long time since I read the Constitution too closely. States already have signature requirements for getting on the ballot anyway though. But the supreme Court saying these requirements for this office are ok but these other requirements for this other office aren't is going to get real ugly real fast
After looking more closely at precedent and the constitutional outlining, it looks like the list of qualifications for Congress et al are considered exhaustive and require a constitutional amendment to add any further restrictions. Take a look at the decision in U. S. Term Limits Inc V Thornton, which came to the conclusion that states cannot impose qualifications on federal congressional candidates and that a states people's have the right to deny them at election time if they so choose. So I concede. It's a good idea, but the system makes it difficult to implement. Unless another FDR style tragedy happens in office and then some big national tragedy happens, I really don't see a way to get this passed.
But for state government, the term limits could be passed. Idk how beneficial that really is, but 🤷♂️
Oh god, don't make me remember that.
No, they can't. The SCOTUS ruled in 1995 that states cannot impose qualifications for prospective members of the U.S. Congress stricter than those the Constitution specifies.
state-imposed restrictions ... violate a third idea central to this basic principle: that the right to choose representatives belongs not to the States, but to the people
What a fucking crazy quote in the face of the electoral college.
Well that's going to stick in the craw of certain state legislatures when they try to overrule the will of the voters in the upcoming election.
Well, people don't really have the choice to not vote for people they deem to old if they are the only person running for their party. If we had rules for maximum ages that would force parties to offer us younger candidates to vote for
One of my favorite thing about Age being one of the protected classes is that they literally wrote it as "you can't discriminate by age UNLESS THE PERSON IS TOO YOUNG.
They took the legislation against age discrimination and said only they were allowed to discriminate.
I don't think people who won't be around long enough to see the effects of their legislation should be anywhere near the levers of power.
This is our time boomers, fuck off and die already. We will try cleaning up the mess you made of our planet.
I'm on board with some sort of age cap, but it shouldn't be a specific age/number cutoff.
That number should be dynamic and change according to some other metric like the average life expectancy of someone in that country. Maybe something like 90-95% of the life expectancy of the country?
At least that way we can provide another incentive for politicians to push forward legislation that will help increase the overall life expectancy of the nation as a whole.
They would redefine what life expectancy means rather than care about improving it.
Please let it be "senior citizen".
Like... We give people at a certain age benefits because we don't expect them to be fully capable past that age.
No, social security exists because older folks were dying in poverty. They may be capable of many things at age, but hard labor isn't one of them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Voters in North Dakota on Tuesday backed a constitutional amendment that would impose age restrictions on congressional candidates.
The new measure bans people from running for a House or Senate seat in North Dakota "if that person could attain 81 years of age by December 31st of the year immediately preceding the end of the term."
It is believed to be the first-in-the-nation measure imposing age limits on candidates running for federal office, but it's also expected to be challenged in court.
There are at least 10 members of Congress over 80, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Whip Steny Hoyer.
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, who is seeking his second full Senate term and won an unopposed primary in North Dakota on Tuesday, said he opposes the measure and believes that voters should get to vote for whoever they want, regardless of age.
"To limit those decisions arbitrarily just doesn’t make sense to me,” Cramer told the Associated Press.
The original article contains 244 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 34%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The good news about this is that representatives and senators from North Dakota won't be chairing any committees, since they won't have seniority.