Speaker 1: David, do you think there should be a maximum age for president, like there
is a minimum age for president?
So let's ignore constitutionality, because there simply you know, there's a question
as to whether you would be able to put in a maximum age of let's imagine you could if
you wanted to, and forget the constitutionality of it.
So there's there's really two questions here.
There's two ways we could be thinking of a maximum age.
One is we want to have some way of limiting how long people can be in elected office because
we don't want career politicians.
So as an alternative to a term limit, you could do a maximum age.
That's one reason you might want to do it.
The other side is because you genuinely think we just shouldn't have people over a certain
age doing the job, even if they're not career politicians either, because you think that
after a certain age people are less effective, less cognitively able, or for whatever other
reason, you just don't want older people being president or in some other position.
So if the idea is the former, which is we just want to restrict the number of years
someone can be in elected office to event to prevent people like Chuck Grassley, Nancy
Pelosi from staying in power for so long, they're sort of our other ways to deal with
that.
Term limits is a far simpler one.
Fixing gerrymandering to eliminating so many safe seats where once you become the incumbent,
no one from your party or another party is going to knock you out.
I think that would would reduce how long people stay in power.
There are some ideas that having a sort of representative system rather than just individual
first past the post, it's either one winner or sort of like a percentage based system
like they have in other countries would be a way to do it.
I'm not so sure about that.
But if the idea is just to kind of go the direction of preventing career politicians,
I think there are simpler ways than a maximum age and probably more palatable to the public
ways.
Now, if your perspective is old people in politics are just bad, remember that if the
general public overall decided that it's a priority not to have older people win, they
could say, well, we're going to vote for younger people and you don't necessarily have to restrict
choice there.
And then you get to the question of, well, then why do we have a lower limit?
Right.
Like if the American public genuinely thought a 12 year old would be better than the candidates
that are adults, then they should vote for that person.
But you might say most Americans would realize that that doesn't make sense.
But then you remember that they did elect Trump after all.
So then that makes you question anything that relies on the presumed intelligence of the
electorate.
So I think that if you start going with an upper limit and saying, well, you should have
an upper limit, that raises questions of why do we have limits at all if it's really just
about letting the American people decide on the best candidates?
I think it's sort of tough along those lines.
The bigger question to me, if the aspect of this that's most concerning is a cognitive
issue, is the possibility of saying here we're going to put in place three or four different
requirements, that would include if you want to have something like the Montreal cognitive
assessment, you have it, but maybe something else as well.
I'm not against it in principle.
I think that it does get back to the issue of constitutionality and pragmatics because
it'll just never happen.
I mean, I would like to have a president imagine for a second, and this is completely anti
constitutional.
It's in a sense it's authoritarian because you're imposing limits that that could be
even misused in some way against a certain sectors of the population.
But imagine if to be a major, you know, to be a party nominee or whatever, Democrats
and Republicans, and why would they do it?
Or the Constitution put in place a rule which said you've got to do a Montreal cognitive
assessment, you need to do a psych eval, the results of which will be published publicly.
And if there's personality disorders or whatever, it's going to be there.
You have to do a basic on the spot like basic American history and constitutionality, not
to the point of like you have the knowledge of a constitutional lawyer, but just really
basic things about history.
Who who were the allies and the axis of evil in World War two or, you know, just really
simple things.
Many candidates would immediately be humiliated or they would actually have to study and take
it seriously and we would end up with more informed candidates.
That's super interesting to me, although I think there's an authoritarian aspect to it,
and I don't think there's any way that it happens constitutionally.
So the answer to should there be an upper age limit my.
Question to you is, what is the goal, is it to prevent career politicians, is it to ensure
that our elected officials are cognitively capable?
Is it because you just don't think, for whatever reason, that the country should be led by
people above a certain age?
Depending on your answers to those questions, the approach that could be taken varies pretty
dramatically.
And I'd be interested in hearing from you about that