At lunch today I was talking with a friend about Nikki Haley. I suggested she needed something to differentiate herself, something that would grab people's attention and make her more than just another minor league candidate taking on Donald Trump.
Little did I know that apparently she's already decided that slagging old people will be her calling card:
Haley doubles down on cognitive tests as White House, older lawmakers bristle
Right. That should do it. Keep it up, Nikki:
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley bashed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over his criticism of her proposal for mental acuity tests for sitting members of Congress ages 75 and up. “Bernie Sanders lost his mind because I asked for that. He is exactly the reason we need it,” Haley said in response to a crowd member's question about the comment.
I dunno. Is this a winning platform? Does she really want to get down in the mud over who's lost it and who hasn't? And will that persuade lots of people that she's presidential material? Color me skeptical.
You forget that these are the Republicans. As long as she attacks Dems and doesn’t try to apply the same standard to Republicans, they like her better. Logic and fairness are for suckers.
As long as she attacks Dems and doesn’t try to apply the same standard to Republicans, they like her better
She is attacking Republicans. Her early strategy very clearly is intended to attack both Biden and Trump.
I think it's as smart a strategy as any, given her paltry shot at the nomination. In the event RDS wins, she'd potentially be a choice for running mate. In the off chance Haley's the nominee, she's already prepared the ground work against Biden. And if we're in recession next year, such a line of attack might well stick.
Also, it's early days yet: this is time you want to test messaging strategies.
"She is attacking Republicans. Her early strategy very clearly is intended to attack both Biden and Trump."
Except Trump has also publicly called for cognitive tests for presidential candidates. And he spent a year touting his passing grade on that cognitive test for stroke victims (the one where you had to correctly identify a giraffe as a giraffe, and recall a sequence of three nouns after it was spoken to you).
The best way for Haley to attack Trump, if she was interested in that, would be to call him a loser. But she isn't.
Except Trump has also publicly called for cognitive tests for presidential candidates
Sure. I'm not suggesting Trump was caught without a response. I was simply bringing up the fact that Haley's rhetoric about "old people" was clearly an attack on Trump (as well as a broadside against Biden).
Maybe. I'm not sure that Republicans and Trump supporters actually think of Trump as old and frail (and those are the folks Haley has to win over)--I think that they somehow believe that Trump is hale and energetic. Recall in 2016 how they pitched that Clinton was exhausted and sickly? How Trump crowed that Jeb (nearly 7 years his junior) was "low energy"? How little traction Trump's mysterious emergency visit to Walter Reed received, or how little the fact that he nearly died of Covid stuck to him?
Attacking Biden for passing out in the middle of a cofeve tweet might work, but it's been established that sort of tactic with Trump doesn't work.
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There is lots of hate for old people out there, and hate is one of the cornerstones of the GOP platform. Their idiotic base always assumes that punitive proposals will not apply to themselves, only to "those people."
I saw a new Finding Your Roots tonight. Angela Davis -- yes, THAT Angela Davis of the Famous Fro -- was one of the guests and we found out a lot about her. For instance, she had a Revolutionary War soldier but a MUCH bigger, brighter cherry on top of the sundae was that she's descended from William Brewster, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony.
That should fry the synapses for people like Cucker "Bowtie" Tarlson.
They never think the leopards will eat THEIR faces.
Good grief. She's (a) a female, (b) a daughter of immigrants, and (c) vaguely brownish. Surely that's differentiation enough in a field of white male xenophobes. She's this year's token female, just as Tim Scott looks like being the token Black. Neither has the slightest chance of getting the nomination.
clearly this only applies to the old people that Nikki, her supporters and the right wing propaganda networks do not approve of. No right wing extremists will mistake this as applying to them or their team.
Given that understanding, while it cant be her only issue, it will be enough to entertain the propaganda channels and onlime forums for a while and drum up some buzz for Nikki. She will have to escalate to keep them entertained.....maybe jailing the people who fail along with some reference to the good ole days when we used tests to stop black people from voting.
Pretty soon the base is in love and the propaganda channels cant stop talking about jailing old democrats and ways to ensure every immigrant (europe excluded) and minority in America has to take the test.
By 2024 we are all wondering about the Supreme Court interpreting how cognitive tests can be applied to other rights and freedoms after Alito gives a big fundraiser speech about test grades and Clarence's wife's emails about applying different tests to different zip codes just like George Washington wrote about in his long lost diary.
Its all coming together.....
She had years to think this through and this is her shtick? What a shmuck.
“ Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley defended states’ rights to secede from the United States, South Carolina’s Confederate History Month and the Confederate flag in a 2010 interview with a local activist group that “fights attacks against Southern Culture.””
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/politics/nikki-haley-secession-confederate-history-month-flag-kfile/index.html
So I guess she can run with Empty G.
I'm guessing her immigrant parents would've loved to immigrate to the Independent Confederate Nation of South Carolina, so that young Nimarata could have enjoyed just as many opportunities as Nikki has had in the universe in which South Carolina remains just 1 of 50 states.
Seriously though, why is there never a shortage of Uncle Toms and Auntie Tammies in the US willing to sell out their community? Does having lots of money and/or a modicum of power really compensate for selling your soul, like these token minorities do all the time in the GOP? Like, it's not as if Nimarata Nikki Haley would be poor if she didn't fellate the GOP as fervently as she does... she could live a decent upper middle class life with her soul intact.
Perhaps she’ll get MoJo’s endorsement?-) https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/11/chuck-grassley-is-too-old-stop-running-and-please-just-reitire/
I suspect https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/04/dianne-feinstein-88-senate-memory-report/ implies they might endorse cognitive testing.
It got attention. And everyone thinks Trump is crazy. Joe is older than dirt. Too old to be president really, but that's what's on offer.
Nimarata Randhawa is creepy. And since she is a woman and of color and one of those fake christians (really sikh?) she has no chance.
Are we sure she was born in the USA? Let's see that fake birth certificate!
And the worst crime of all... she had some completely whacked religious fanatic at her rally. John Hagee. If she is a christian, she is the worst kind of all.
Too bad PRESIDENT Biden demonstrated over the long weekend that he definitely still had plenty of energy in Kyiv.
Other than a late-second term Reagan and perhaps current Sen Feinstein, who would actually fail this test? Biden? He's just an older version of his always sort of slightly incoherent self. Trump? Stupid - yes, in cognitive decline? Probably not.
Term limits for all would be a better approach. if one was serious.
I couldn’t have kept up with Biden’s pace when I was in my thirties. It would have taken me days to recover from a trip like the one he just made to Ukraine and Poland. And Bernie needs no cognitive test either. Just listen to his recent interview on Colbert’s show. I would love to see him debate Nikki Haley. He and his old brain would run rings around her.
Y'know, we DO have term limits for Presidents. Some people believe when the first term begins at age 78, the limit ought to be one, not two. And apparently Mrs. Haley thinks it ought to be zero.
Since I am the same age as President Biden, and I work fulltime in the construction industry (in a desk job), and I have no plans to stop working anytime soon, I think it's a crock.
I bait my mother about competence tests for voters over 65.
She believes in restricting the franchise in significantly more ways that have less to do with personal judgement, this is entirely fair.
> Term limits for all would be a better approach.
If you want to reduce the power of voters relative to professional lobbyists, sure.
Most people have not thought out the consequences of term limits for Congresscritters. Corporations could just pick their own candidates, guarantee them a great job when their terms are up if they do the company’s bidding, then pour a ton of money into his or her campaign through a dark money super pac so they can hide the fact that the candidate is a corporate plant. Money is even more important for newcomers because incumbents have a built in advantage and usually get reelected.
Term limits for presidents make sense because you don’t want one person have that much power for that long. And we definitely need term limits that are staggered for Supreme Court justices.
Well stated! Also, by limiting terms, each new Congressbeing has less time to learn the ropes, become acquaintences with the other members (I know, I know; Gingrich), get experience in effectively using the system, becoming expert in their areas of committee membership.
So, as you note, you get a congress comprised of semi ignorant naifs, informed by and at the mercy of their sponsoring corporation(s).
TERM LIMITS = FRESH STUPID MEAT FOR LOBBYISTS.
Yup. We all know that experience makes for better job performance, but people weirdly think the principle doesn't apply to politicians. It very much does.
As presidential candidates go: Bobby Jindal redux.
Whatever happened to him, anyway?
How about instead every member of Congress has to pass a test of basic knowledge of civics and US history?
Yes.
But I doubt that most could pass the current citizenship test.
It's an crude avenue of attack against older politicians and especially Biden. IT'll resonate somewhat with all non-boomers who have voiced weariness with the grasp the older generations have held on certain positions. In the end though, the I doubt is sways many and may lose her the retirees.
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should be required to take a cognitive test.
As a poli sci undergrad, I used to believe strongly that term limits were a bad idea, for pretty much all the reasons that other commenters raise here.
But as I get older and watch America slide into political stalemate/dysfunction, it's become really obvious that most voters (1) aren't putting much thought at all into their voting, usually just rubber-stamping the incumbent over and over again regardless of anything they actually do while in office, (2) aren't usually sending their best and brightest from their districts and states to Washington anyway, whether they're incumbents or newcomers, and (3) are easily gerrymandered into irrelevancy during the few periods when they wise up and decide to "throw the bums out" but the state government is of the same party as the bums.
So with idiots and grifters making up larger and larger proportions of Congress, and with incumbents aware that - unless they are caught raping children or something equally horrific - they are likely to win reelection forever due to laziness of voters and gerrymandering by their friends in state capitols... it's apparent to me that there is definitely not enough churn in Congress. Term limits would increase the churn. You could keep sending dimbulbs and nazis from +27 Red districts, but at least you'd have to keep finding new dimbulbs/nazis (and hopefully eventually run out of the really awful ones).
Also, the theory that longer-serving Congresspeople being more independent/knowledgeable and therefore less likely to be controlled/captured by lobbyists seems to defy all actual evidence. I understand the theory that naive legislators might end up dependent on lobbyists to "show them the way." But, it's not as if it's unheard of for long-term Congresspeople in there now to also be shameless shills for lobbyists. Most states don't have term limits either for their legislatures, and lobbying outfits like ALEC, the Koch brothers, Art Pope in NC, etc. enjoy lots of success at writing state laws that are rubber stamped by their paid-for state legislatures. So I really have come to believe that the whole "lobbyists will be able to control less experienced politicians more easily" to be a sham... lobbyists don't seem to have any trouble controlling politicians of any length of time in an electoral system in which campaign funding has practically no limits.
I'll end with a personal anecdote: I live in Virginia, and it's *awesome* knowing that as awful as Youngkin is, his ass will definitely be gone in 2026 because governors here cannot hold 2 consecutive terms. I so wish the same were true for lots of other asshat governors and US senators to stunt their rise into the presidential election circuit.
TL;DR: In a universe in which voters don't vote logically, consistently or in their own stated self-interest - which appears to be the universe in which American voters actually live - term limits add randomness to what otherwise appears to quickly result in one political party and its associated lobbyists eventually capturing legislatures, courts and even executives (except presidents and my state's governors) for long periods of time. In the world in which we live in, the one in which the US president is blamed for everything that the executive, legislative and judicial branches does at both the federal and state levels, we really need to artificially introduce more mechanisms for churn at the non-presidential level... and term limits would be one way to do that.
At the very least, introducing more randomness would make it harder for lobbyists - who, don't kid yourself, already have control over a good 60-90% of what the state and federal governments do now - to predict outcomes for their "investments" in politics. The risks of them backing a candidate that turns out to be a turncoat for the other side or simply incompetent at pushing the lobbyists' goals would go up.
I would have traded two terms of Ralph Northam for none of Glenn Youngkin , proprieter of his very own church.
For that matter, if his predecessors Warner, ,Kaine,* & McAuliffe whose judgment of who should be in charge of schools in the old dominion was right but "inartfully expressed," had been eligible for two terms to consolidate progress in a state with a part-time legislature, we wouldn't now be enduring a second ambitious governor who has been on a publicity binge due to his obvious intention to be considered for president.
Turnover every four years when a capable governor is faced with the absurdities of the "New World's" oldest legislative body- except for the Iriquois? - often means that it's one step forward & at least one back, this being Virginia.
* And I'd probably have crossed over to vote for Kaine's late father-in-law, Linwood Holton.
Now that the Supreme Court has evolved into the SuperSenate*, and insured that we will have the best Congress money can buy, it’s clear that we need term limits for the black robes, along with a selection process that weeds out theocrats and ideologues committed to the fantasy of laissez-faire capitalism.
*I don’t think West Virginia v. US Environmental Protection Agency gets enough attention. The Court took it upon itself to decide what questions are of “vast economic and political significance” - although it is not supposed to be a political body, and is not staffed with advisors with expertise in economics, as are the Legislative and Executive branches.
The only mental acuity test that matters,
Did you vote for Donald Trump?
Did you take the job he offered you?
But Haley doesn't look hot in a bikini. She's past her prime. Don Lemon covered this already.
when WAS her prime? as far as i know, she's always been a republican
True. So she hasn't been an appealing candidate to me at any time. I don't really care if she's as goofy as Don Lemon.
So, what happens if a politician fails her test? Execution? Banishment to a deserted island? Removed from office against the wishes of their voters? I mean, how unconstitutional does she want to get?
And the test should also pply to prospective voters, if we're going to flout the Constitution- a variant of Jim Crow voting eligibility tests, applied to everyone!
I have long thought that federal employees above a certain age should get annual neurological exams, because undetected dementia wreaks all kinds of havoc. It is FAR better for a person with dementia to know it early, while they are still lucid enough to make sound decisions, so that they can gracefully retire from their job, secure their money and plan their care. Otherwise they end up embarrassing themselves at work, losing their money to scammers, and having all their care decisions being made for them, not always by the people they would have chosen.
I am staunchly anti-ageism and have regularly shot back at people who think Biden shouldn't run again because of his age. Nevertheless I'm cognizant of the fact that everyone's health collapses eventually, and that event needs to be accounted for and planned for.
Nikki Haley, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be focusing on that issue. There is a HUGE difference between a brain that has slowed normally with age and a brain that has dementia. Having senior moments is not disqualifying for a public official, and Bernie Sanders is not in the same boat as Dianne Feinstein. There's a difference between a practical proposal to detect dementia early, and simply disparaging the intelligence of the elderly.
If they tested candidates for delusional disorder, a vast majority of the MAGA / GOP currently in office would fail.
It’s funny because it’s true!
Doesn't matter if it is winning or not. It is unconstitutional. The requirements for Congress are clearly stated and that isn't one of them.
I'm pretty sure Nikki Haley knows that if she is elected, she will swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. All of it. Not just the good parts. Or maybe she doesn't. Maybe she needs to be tested for cognitive decline.
Can we have tests for NPD, sociopathy, and psychopathy too? Politicians with these issues are a far greater danger to the republic than a few old leaders with a bit of dementia.