Judge Newman has threatened to have staff arrested, forcibly removed from the building, and fired. She accused staff of trickery, deceit, acting as her adversary, stealing her computer, stealing her files, and depriving her of secretarial support. Staff have described Judge Newman in their interactions with her as “aggressive, angry, combative, and intimidating”; “bizarre and unnecessarily hostile”; making “personal accusations”; “agitated, belligerent, and demonstratively angry”; and “ranting, rambling, and paranoid.” Indeed, interactions with Judge Newman have become so dysfunctional that the Clerk of the Court has advised staff to avoid interacting with her in person or, when they must, to bring a co-worker with them.
This didn’t happen overnight, if it’s this bad now then her judgement has been compromised for a long time.
We need term limits, because once these (completely normal) mental changes start happening, the person will almost always react with aggression and refuse to ever step down.
We have a thing called senior citizenry.
It’s an age at which we decided old folks can start skimming funds off the top to make ends meet, because they are otherwise unable
It is absolutely unconscionable to be collecting social security while simultaneously holding office.
No one over the age of 65 should be allowed to hold any office. Ever.
I don’t think age needs to be the limiting factor. I’ve met plenty of 70+ year olds who are mentally capable of performing any job. My grandfather is in his 80’s and he’s a kick ass doctor.
I strongly feel that it needs to be test and check up based. Something impartial treated with an air of dignity so that people are raised respecting that it’s perfectly alright to not pass it. That should help avoid stigma while ensuring people like that judge are a non-issue if not nearly a non-issue.
But there is a HUGE difference between living a healthy, active, and fulfilling life and holding a public office deciding extremely sensitive and important things that will decide the outcome of someone’s life or the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
What if 50% of people above a certain age have a mental of physical disability(example), then would an age limit be justified? There are probably more 25-30 year olds than 70-80 year olds that are mentally and intellectually sound enough to hold office.
I’m fully in favor of having better representation in our elected offices but limiting it based solely on age feels bad a like solution when the problem is based on problems that may happen with age.
For example, let’s say you were a berry eater who loves wild berries. You go out and eat a berry and notices that later on it gave you indigestion, after several more times that berry has consistently done it but other berries do not, would you stop eating wild berries or identify the one giving you indigestion and stop eating those?
It’s a silly example, but it works. If someone is capable of performing the position without issues they should be able to. That’s why I’m advocating for a solution that’s based on identifying those solutions after they appear so that anyone who is capable and has the desire can work as they like.
For those capable people, a fulfilling life can be defined as working the position. Why stop them from it?
I understand what you are saying.
However, why shouldn’t there be a lower age limit on elected office? Plenty of capable people for it. If they are capable of performing the position without issues they should be able to.
It has to go both ways because the exact same arguments can be made for each end of the age spectrum.
I couldn’t agree more!
Lower the age limits a bit, and add in some mandatory health checks.
Gotta say, you’re one the people who makes me love Lemmy so much more than reddit. Good discussion, and being able to disagree and agree respectfully
Because they need to get out of the way for the next generation.
Your examples work well in La La land but in reality those tests and checkups would be riddled with fraud and favouritism.
There isn’t an age limit to youth running in office. Go on, take some responsibility then.
Tests would be a pretty bad idea. It is easy to imagine the ways that someone could use that to attack their political opponents. Similar things were used to disenfranchise voters in the past. Also, it is too easy to corrupt the legitimacy of such a test. All a person would need to do is get a heads up of how the test works and practice for it. Or, have the test designed to be too easy to pass. It’s easy to say “make it impartial, scientific, and dignified”, but that doesn’t mean it will be. I seriously doubt any governmental body ever has or will be that trustworthy. An actual age limit would be objective and clear though, making it much more practical.
How would an opponent be able to attack you if the test is pass or fail? You either are able to have an opponent or you can’t run.
Using a strict age limit would only result in a segment of people who are paying taxes without having representation which is the exact situation we’re brainstorming ideas to avoid.
Instead, the group in question has had almost exclusive representation for half a century. There are lower age limits, so there should be upper limits.
I don’t believe in two wrongs making a right. I consider a lack of lower age representation a problem but I can not agree to flipping it around and making it a lack of upper age representation either. If that’s your idea of a just society when a presented method could solve this without that issue I have concerns.
All people and all generations are entitled to the right to self-determination. That’s something that we have seen is not possible without such limits.
And why can’t we fulfill that with term limits and pass fail capability tests?
Really seems to uphold your first statement much better than disenfranchising an entire group of people simply they are old.
I don’t want an 80 year old as a doctor. My luck he’d be hit with Mega Alzheimer’s right in the operating room and rearrange my insides to look like a Christmas tree because he thought he was 25 again and decorating one with his first born son again.
It should be easier to whistle blow if someone thinks a worker is losing capacity to do their job, but having an arbitrary age at which you’re no longer allowed to work in office doesn’t serve its purpose. Some people can have dementia starting in their 50s, and other people in their 70s are excellent in higher level positions due to how much experience they’ve amassed.
If anything, there should just be better peer performance reviews across the board.
Removed by mod
That’s why. There are certain things that are significant enough that we don’t let just anyone do them, yet also important enough to self-determination that we don’t usually say a person will never be allowed to make that choice. That age when we’ve decided people are mentally, not physically, mature enough to make those decisions is 18. Most people have reached that threshold, some have been there for years, some never will be. Some will barely skim past that threshold, and we will hear stories about them for years. Those who are incapable of breaching that threshold have some or all of their rights as adults removed, and we call that guardianship, power of attorney, and similar things.
The difference between minors and incapable seniors is that some never become that much less capable, and those that do will do so over a truly significant span of years, like half a lifetime’s difference. So how do you pick a number and say, “This is when adults are too old to make good decisions,” without disregarding the capabilities of the vast majority of the people affected on the low side of the range or being far too late to matter on the high side? Perhaps dealing with something with such a great degree of variability should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
There is a mandatory retirement age for airline transport pilots. 65 years of age. There are also mandatory medical examinations for ALL commercial pilots.
Now, the general public has a uniquely great interest in an airline pilot’s cardiovascular health, aka “is the geezer in the cockpit going to have a heart attack between here and Newark?”
In a job like a judge or other government official whose job is largely paperwork, no heavy equipment is operated, I can see perhaps extending it to 70 years old or something, possibly with a part-time stipulation and possibly on condition of passing some cognition test, something.
But yes something has to be done about the age epidemic in our government offices, our country should not be run primarily by the People Who Should Be Dead By Now If God Had Any Mercy demographic.
I’m not sure why you’re so fixated on physical well-being for a job that has no negative consequences for poor physical health, and we have numerous examples of judges performing their jobs so poorly that an appeal is pretty much a slam dunk, regardless of age. Yet even when you acknowledge the merits of tests for mental competence in a field that literally references having sound judgement in its name, you still have to circle back to the age issue. There are better metrics than that, even ignoring the fact that we have good evidence that there are pretty shitty people in positions of power from just about every age demographic that can get elected or appointed.
I’m “so fixated on physical well-being” because there are folks in this discussion saying that no one should be working at all over 65. Let me reiterate my points, low attention span listicle style:
So there needs to be some practical limit to the age of government officials.
I will say this one last time. Equating the necessity for certain jobs to require physical fitness with the requirement for other jobs to have mental fitness makes no sense. This does not mean we shouldn’t remove people from their jobs because they are old, but because they are unfit. When there is a strong correlation between fitness and age, such as physical well-being, and a failure to perform your job puts lives on the line, age limits make sense. When there is a much weaker correlation between age and fitness, such as mental acuity, other tools will achieve better results.
All of this is tangential to setting a retirement age. If you as a nation are going to require people to stop working at a specific age, then you as a nation should be willing to guarantee the financial well-being of people over a certain age. If you don’t want to support them, then you shouldn’t mandate they stop being able to support themselves. Currently, about a quarter of the American workforce is over 65. I guarantee a significant number of them aren’t doing it out of preference rather than necessity.
So we shouldn’t give social security to people unless they have dementia?
We already have an arbitrary age set. We should stick to it.
I’m still game for removing someone earlier than that if they are unfit. But after 65? You’re not fit. Even if you “are.” You’re too far removed from the policies you’d be enacting. It’s just nonsense.
I think that’s a disservice to people who have intimate knowledge of how a service has developed over time, and common problems with change that younger people may not have experienced.
I’m not saying that people should all be forced or unduly enabled to carry on working well into their seniority, but we’d be missing the opportunity to utilise skills and experience by enforcing a hard limit - certainly as young as 65!
The problem is that you’d need an objective, unbiased, incorruptible review process. I have zero faith that any government is capable of providing such a thing, particularly in a situation like this, where there’s so much room for interpretation.
Selecting an arbitrary age has its own problems, but at least it’s much simpler and harder to argue with.
Anyone who’s dealt with someone with early dementia will recognize this behavior. I can empathize with those suffering from it, because my own mind slipping away would be incredibly frustrating. But if you’re a danger to yourself and others someone needs to stop you, whether its to keep you from driving or to keep you from presiding over trials.