If The Garbageman Has To Pass A Test, Why Don't Politicians?

I have an idea for what will likely be an unpopular proposal, but I believe it's time that we have a minimum intelligence or experience level to hold government office.

I propose tests that every person desiring to hold elected office must pass. Not one warped by a state like Texas or Mississippi or Idaho (Fuck Idaho!) ;), but one wherein a body of learned academics have put their minds together to figure out what a person in a particular office - from dogcatcher to President - should logically be expected to know before they can even get their name on the ballot. 

I suggest things like - the first here will be the unpopular part - economics, the US Constitution, math, science, US and world history, geography, current events, and any other area deemed important for any person holding office to know. 

No more mythology-based illogic. No more Paul Ryan whackadoodle, trickle-down economics. No more 'a woman's body has a way of shutting those things down'. 

A little learning goes a long way, as does the intelligence with which to yield it. We need to stop venerating average (George W Bush), stupid (John Boehner, 'Jersey Shore', Rick Scott), and plain evil (Ted Nugent, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox News), and start advocating for people, ideas, and programs that raise the bar. That doesn't mean that we should make the average person a second-class citizen; it just means that by electing those who're smarter than the rest of us, the rest of us might want to pull a little harder.

In Defense of Intellectual Liberal Bias

Both denial of rigor and denial of objective truth are functions of neoconservatism as manifests in the Tea Party movement and in objectivism. One has no further to look than a brief watch of Fox News or any of the other conservative news outlets to see it in practice.

The liberal bias which intelligence takes is that it prefers on the side of flexible humanism rather than the dogmatic, theocratic reality of conservatism in any form.

This bias manifests as concern for the present and future - both of which can be manipulated and remain transmogrifiable - than for pining for an imagined and concrete past to the point of rewriting it to fit one's paradigm.

It manifests as fascination with the truth that only science can provide rather than the veneration of creationist myths.

Liberal bias means searching for the truth in whether it's better to be materially wealthy or fraternally rich.