politics

You like many Americans are trying to solve cultural rot by putting in more rules. "If only we had a rule that ___" this wouldn't have happened.

That also doesn't fix the problem of an administration that freely ignores the rules with complete impunity.

Being a congress-person is a skill. It requires actual skill

I could never tell by looking at them.

All I see is incompetents at best, and corrupt profiteers at worst. Often both.

Americans love rules. Now I live in England, which has more rules on paper, but where most rules are widely disregarded.

Thank you for putting into words what has seemed obvious to me for decades, but I don't think I've ever put it quite this well.

We have a lot of examples of state governments that have term limits. There's no evidence that governance has been improved. The only thing that changes is that more power shifts to the civil servants, and to the party bureacrats who control the revolving door to the next position.

Term limits are the kind of solutions that you hear MAGAts proposing: if it begins with "Why don't we just..." then it's probably already been thought of, been tried, and has failed.

Well presumably he would be re-elected if he does what he has promised to do.

Depends on the job, but elected members of Congress get an incredible amount of support staff.

First, they have a full team of staffers who can guide them through the legislative processes/procedures. Communications, press, scheduling, admin, secretarial - all provided.

Second, they have support from their own party. Campaign offices, re-election staff, community outreach, all that sort of thing.

Of course, they still don't have time to read every single bill and understand the complexities. But the length of term doesn't help for things like that. The length of term is more to let your constituents decide whether you are doing your job. A vote of confidence/no confidence.

And, an underlying reason for short term limits is balance of power. One chamber of Congress (the House) is filled with an ever-changing cast of "average Joes". The other, more prestigious house (the Senate) is filled with power brokers and career politicians.

Yeah that's fair.

They don't know what "term limits" mean. They might not even know what the term means and just accidentally strung it together even:

should have a 2 year term limit max.

What they're trying to complain about is the length of a term, not a limit to consecutive terms.

But like, best of luck explaining anything to them, every comment has multiple new things that need explained.

The US has term limits for its president.

Maybe in the broadest cynical sense, no. In this case though, Fetterman masqueraded a a democrat and completely changed his act once he got into office.

Even more pedantic and off-topic, but this is actually how the English language used to work. In Old English, "man" just referred to a person, whether they were male or female, adult or child. If you wanted to refer to an adult male specifically, you would say "were", and an adult woman was a "wif". Eventually, male defaultism shifted the language such that "man" referred to an adult male, and adult females were called "wifmen" to avoid confusion, which eventually evolved into "women".

Incidentally, we still see "were" used in modern English as part of the construction of the world "werewolf", literally meaning "man-wolf".

Well at least with the Senate there's a Latin suffix system that is oft forgotten, that being tor trix suffix. So a male Senate member is a senator and female member is a senatrix.

In Anglo-Saxon, "man" meant "person," like Mensch in German still does.

"Woman" was "wyfman"-- female-human-person. And because sexism has ancient roots, the default gender assumption for a person was that they were male.

So it's not quite as straightforward as you propose, and the gender-neutrality you mention wasn't really all that wonderfully gender-neutral after all.

So how about this, based more on modern usage: "person" for a person, regardless of what their gender might be.

"Man" for those of male gender, however that gets socially assigned.

"Woman" for those of female gender, likewise.

And for all the edge and corner cases that make our world so richly diverse, well, we'll need to figure those out too, hopefully without being oppressive about it.

Actually, no I don't believe "congressmen" is gender neutral. Maybe I should have used "representatives" instead but there's nothing wrong with being all inclusive.

Omg dude the tears lol