Constitutionally Questionable

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The subheadline lays out the problem:

Refusal of older officeholders to cede stage to younger faces is prompting fresh calls for a limit on how long they can serve

Statutory limits on how long Congressmen and -women can serve in Congress are constitutionally highly questionable. Here’s what Article I, Sections 2 (on Representatives) and 3 (on Senators) of our Constitution says about eligibility to serve in Congress:

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

And

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

Our Constitution places a floor on age, but it places no ceiling on age, nor does it place any limit on the length of service or number of terms an individual may serve. In many venues, it’s possible for lower jurisdictions to tighten standards of higher jurisdictions, but with our Constitution, such efforts have been routinely disallowed under the Supremacy Clause, which unequivocally states, along with Marbury v Madison, that our Constitution is our supreme law, and Congressional statutes are subordinate to it. It’s most likely that imposing an upper age limit would require an Amendment to our Constitution.

In any event, limiting by age for how long a congressman might serve is a decidedly suboptimal solution to this perceived problem. A much better solution is the term limit that was used in our erstwhile Articles of Confederation. That document’s Article V limited a Congressional delegate to three terms out of six, with no bar on serving further in subsequent six term runs.

The Articles were written for a unicameral Congress, but it’s easily adaptable to our present bicameral Congress. This also would require an Amendment to our Constitution, but it would be a better one that makes medical improvements to the abilities of aging citizens irrelevant.

Bad Logic

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Arizona passed a law five years ago that essentially banned forceable DEI training. An ASU professor brought suit to clarify that the law also

gives public employees an “implied private right of action” to stop such coercion, which in his case was ASU training on how to “critique whiteness.”

A State district court agreed with the professor and ruled accordingly. An Arizona appellate court

“astonishingly” construed lawmakers’ silence on enforcement as confirmation that individuals cannot sue….

The euphemism quotes are from the professor’s lawyers in their reaction to the ruling and as they prepare to appeal to the State’s supreme court.

The lawyers—and any high school student who didn’t sleep through his logic class—are right to be astonished. The appellate court’s “argument” (my euphemism quotes this time) that saying nothing means cannot sue is textbook logic failure. The lawmakers’ silence means nothing other than that they said nothing. The appellate court’s claim otherwise is the court’s putting words into the lawmakers’ mouths the judges have no way of knowing belong there—unless the judges are claiming heretofore unheard of powers of mind reading.

No, and Yes

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NIH director Dr Jay Bhattacharya:

As far as the NIH, we’ve paused every single project that even is anywhere within the vicinity of something that could be gain of function, and the White House is working on a policy…(that) will make it so that it never happens again.
Nowhere in the United States Government will we invest in a project that poses a risk of catastrophic harm to the American people ever again[.]

No. We should continue, and perhaps accelerate, gain of function research across a variety of viruses, and not only those living in animals. We don’t necessarily need the research for our own biological weapons, and such research needs to be done within the most stringent safety protocols. The reasons we should do the research are two, primarily: one is that our enemies are conducting such research; the canonical example being the People’s Republic of China with its efforts that include its lab leak (from incompetent safety execution more than from proximate enmity) of the Wuhan Virus. We need our own gain of function research in order to be better positioned to counter deliberate spreads of successfully weaponized viruses. The need for this is demonstrated by PRC agents recently caught smuggling into our nation a variety of biologic weapons that would poison our nation’s food supply when released.

The other reason is the need to anticipate, understand, and produce effective responses when the inevitable event of another pandemic occurs and threatens national and global economies as well as national and global populations. A short list of examples of this includes the costly and deadly outbreaks of plague, smallpox, Spanish Flu, and the recent Wuhan Virus. All of these were far worse than they could have been had effective remedies been available or more quickly available due to ongoing gain of function research. That gain of function research technologies and methods didn’t exist for most of those cataclysms doesn’t alter the fact that such technologies and methods would have been beneficial then. We have the basics of such technologies and methods today.

I think I can tell you that the appetite for lockdowns in this administration is basically zero. So I don’t think we would have the same kind of approach. …
…
We saw during COVID every single person’s life was affected in some, mostly for the worse. ” …I’ll tell you under my watch, I will never advocate and the NIH will not be advocating for lockdowns ever again.

Yes. The lockdowns not only harmed our economy and isolated adult Americans far too much, they severely damaged our children and not only by losing years of education that still have not been recovered. They also severely damaged our children’s social development, that damage came at ages where our children are their most vulnerable, and in far too many cases the damage will be life-long.

A Thought on VMI

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The Progressive-Democrat-led government of Virginia is moving toward taking Virginia Military Institute fully and solely under State control, the better to inflict implement DEI characteristics in the Institute management and teachings. VMI has long been a source of quality military officers, in addition to the several Military Academies. That seems about to change.

Here’s Assistant SecDef for Public Affairs, Sean Parnell, on the potential:

For generations, the unique military environment at VMI has made the Institute a vital source of commissioned officers for the Armed Forces.
The stability of this proven leadership pipeline is a matter of direct national security interest and any action that could disrupt the ecosystem requires our full attention. DoW reserves the right to take extraordinary measures to protect the integrity of VMI and our commitment to the cadets and midshipmen currently training there remains steadfast.

The most effective “extraordinary measure” and one that would protect our officer corps from the pollution of DEI is this. Stop accepting VIM graduates into the officer corps if the State enacts its bill to bring the school fully and solely under State control. VMI graduates under the State’s planned control would no longer meet the training requirements for commissioning. Require all VMI graduates after the Class of 2025 who wish to become American military officers to undergo officer training from scratch through any of the other officer training programs, which include ROTC, OCS/OTS, any of our Military Academies.

Maybe Europe Isn’t So Much our Friend

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Begin with so many of NATO’s European members welching on their financial and equipage commitments to NATO. This represents less a matter of their word being worthless, important as that is, but represents far more an utter betrayal of their fellow members. It’s these shirkers’ insistent reliance on their fellow members for protection even as they refuse to be capable of contributing to their fellows’ protection. That betrayal includes us. Europe’s nations might not be able to contribute much to our defense, but as many insist (for the most part correctly), allies are important to our national security.

But Europe’s essential lack of friendliness extends, now, to naked attempts to censor Americans’ speech within our own nation and anywhere else in the non-UK world. Europe intends to (try to) dictate to us what we are permitted to say.

The European Commission’s coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday’s hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the US.

And this, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum:

tech companies were expected to moderate content from “populist rhetoric” and “anti-elite” sentiment to “political satire” and “meme subculture.”

Globally, too—which means within the US as the arrest of the Irish comedian demonstrates—not just inside Europe.

And this, giving concreteness to Europe’s enmity toward American businesses and their leadership teams and to us American citizens in general:

Paris police…raid[ed] X‘s local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” April 20.
The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, “in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe,” the committee said Tuesday.

It’s possible to argue that President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs are the wrong tool with which to deal with Europe, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s not wrong about the need. My suggestion to Musk and Yaccarino: don’t go to France for the interviews; conduct them, instead, via video over the Internet. There’s little reason to expect that these two, were they to go to France for the interviews, would be freely and easily able to leave after the interviews.