I hope that if term limits ever become a thing, it would only take a few elections of well informed voters to start making the change.
I think that congress is supposed to be a fluid body of people that are supposed to represent the population, and change as the population's interests change.
What we have now is career politicians making it to congress, and then milking it with all the donations, re election groups and lobby groups funneling them money making it very hard to actually enact any real change.
Even if one or two people make it to congress that are young and full of ideas/change they cannot get anything done because they are vastly outnumbered by the old fogies still writing policies like the 1950's.
Moreover, it takes more than one term to achieve any meaningful change. Things like Obamacare didn’t just start with Obama. Major changes takes 10+ years.
Congress/senators should be under better scrutiny, yes. Don’t let them become corrupt, prevent insider trading etc. but terms limits is not the solution to this problem. In my opinion I think term limit would rule out “poor people” from ever trying to run for office.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...
What alternatives are there other than achieving meaningful representation in government e.g. Congress?
The ultimate alternative is going to be voting from the rooftops, when we've finally become fed up with the results of their corruption.
"Google ad set up got them approved everything was ready to rock and roll I was the most googled candidate of the night as I have been for every debate that I've participated in the issue was during that first debate you know what while that peak period was happening our Google ad account was suspended by Google with no explanation whatsoever."
So firstly on meaningful communication: Under the guise of freedom of speech nowadays falsehoods, and even more critically just plain noise is pervasive; the freedom to shout nonsense is inhibiting the freedom to hear a reasonable and diverse set of opinions and facts. Most (loud and repeated) messages are by corporations and other groups too; because that channel simply has more resources - and that's unfortunate not because corporations are intrinsically evil (which they aren't), but because people are intrinsically social and groups of people often quite the reverse; so that corporate "speech" in the form of campaign finance typically is plainly corruption - albeit legal, even if most of its constituent individuals are reasonably moral people. In short; we know the evils of censorship and have robust traditions to at least oppose that; but we do not have similar traditions vs. overload and deception, and indeed our (entirely reasonable) protections against censorship make us more vulnerable to these rising problems. Is there a solution? Who knows; but any solution certainly is not on the public radar yet let alone nearby.
Secondly on democracy: It's pretty plausible that democracies undeniable success in the past centuries may have benefited in part be due to the uncanny wisdom of the crowds. But that effect has risks and flaws (a quick google finds e.g. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140708-when-crowd-wisdo... discussing some of those). And as it so happens, simply because we communicate so much nowadays, we're always bombarded with what which constituency will vote / should vote / thinks / etc; in ways that would have been simply inconceivable a century ago. And exactly that kind of information turns out to critically undermine the wisdom of the crowds. Polling (and in general political commentary not on the substance but on the shifting political winds themselves) is poison to democracy. The more people know about how others vote and how they should vote... the worse they vote collectively. Democracy's decision making advantage is being eroded without any malice or election manipulation required; it's an entirely natural social process that indeed may well be the ultimate root cause of the polarization of US politics.
We're not going to get congress to do much good until we can get democracy to work again; and we won't be able to do that until we have some way to address these fundamental, underlying weaknesses we currently face. Almost by definition if you can get one party on board, there will be another that's opposed - and a cacophony of voices shouting factually inconsistent statements, lies, disagreements, lobbying to the point that no unbiased sampling of voters will ever exist. So whether people have thought about it or not; everybody realizes that grand benign national changes are utterly beyond the divided, impotent congress that suggesting they do more then keep the lights on (and even that is pushing it nowadays!) is so naive as to come across as almost insincere.
It brings to mind a quixotic approach of trying to value influence quantitatively. Like trying to figure out how much value could be extracted from a celebrity endorsement.
In theory. In practice, Congress members are not selected by a public electorate, but rather by careful gerrymandering practices paid for by corporate interests designed to benefit themselves financially. In the USA, you have no choice of your elected leaders.
The public can change the composition of the Congress, which has oversight and lawmaking authorities over domestic intelligence agencies.