Dan McLaughlin advocates mandatory retirement ages for government officials, to be enforced by constitutional amendment. Between Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Mitch McConnell, we currently have high-profile examples of ageing politicians becoming frail in real time.
Dan wants age caps on the presidency, the Senate, the House, and the courts. The president alone is the commander in chief of the armed forces, the chief executive of the federal workforce, and the head of state. If he is unable to perform those roles because of old age, there could be severe consequences. Dan notes that we have so far been fortunate to avoid a disaster that is due to an age-hobbled president, but it could be wise to forestall it by amending the Constitution.
Except that we already amended the Constitution for such a situation. The 25th Amendment provides that the vice president can become president, temporarily or permanently, in cases of the president’s disability. And a president who truly cannot serve ought to resign anyway, and would likely be pressured to do so if the situation demanded it.
The age distribution of senators has commonly skewed older, and that’s not an inherent problem. Feinstein is probably not fit to be a senator. McConnell is probably not fit to fulfill the extra role of GOP leader anymore, but he could still represent Kentucky in the Senate, as NR’s editorial noted. The other senators aged 80 or older — Chuck Grassley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Risch — seem to be in good shape now (Sanders’s 2019 heart attack notwithstanding). Zoom out to the senators between 75 and 79, who would soon run into Dan’s proposed age limit of 80, and nearly all eleven of them are in decent health.
In the House, education-and-workforce-committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx is 80, and she’s doing a great job, standing up to the Biden administration on Department of Education and Department of Labor overreach. Politico did a profile of the hard-charging Foxx last month. She wouldn’t be affected by Dan’s age limit of 85 for House members, but it’s still worth noting that elderly politicians can, in fact, do their jobs effectively. They just get less attention than the negative examples do.
If we’re concerned about officials dying in office, that happens at a far lower rate today than it did in the past. Three-hundred and one senators have died while in office. Only eight of them have been in this century so far. In the same time span 100 years earlier, from 1900 to 1923, 60 senators died in office. Looking at it by decade, 19 senators died in office in the 1950s, 15 in the ’60s, eight in the ’70s, three in the ’80s, four in the ’90s, four in the ’00s, and four in the ’10s.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, it was only the fourth time in the preceding 66 years that a Supreme Court justice had died while serving. Before Antonin Scalia in 2016 and William Rehnquist in 2005, the last one to die while serving was Robert Jackson in 1954. Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter all retired responsibly in old age.
Age limits for all feels like collective punishment for the poor choices of a few. Feinstein is being irresponsible by not retiring. Ben Cardin, who turns 80 next month, is being responsible and retiring at the end of his term. Richard Shelby retired after completing his term at the age of 88 earlier this year. Jim Inhofe retired at the age of 88 in the middle of his term after both he and his wife had health scares. Steny Hoyer, despite being second in command to Nancy Pelosi for 20 years, stepped aside for the younger Hakeem Jeffries rather than try to be the House Democratic leader at the age of 83 earlier this year. Lower-ranking House members retire in old age after many terms all the time. Jim Sensenbrenner, who represented the district I grew up in, retired at age 77 in 2021, having won his first House election in 1978. Leaving the decision to retire up to officials also allows outliers, such as the exceptionally healthy Grassley, to continue to serve.
Dan writes that “gerontocracy has not produced good governance — with ageing leaders being especially hesitant to worry about the long-term fiscal sustainability of the federal budget,” but I don’t see much evidence that younger officials, on average, would govern better or spend less. Insofar as younger officials are more likely to be progressive than older ones are, I’d expect them to govern worse and spend more.
The decision of what constitutes fitness for office is up to political parties in the nomination process, up to voters in the general election, and ultimately up to the officeholder or candidate himself.
It might be a good idea for parties to throw their institutional support behind younger candidates for the purposes of winning elections. Recruiting younger candidates helped the GOP overperform in House elections in 2020, for example. If parties and pressure groups decided to only fundraise for candidates below a certain age, I’d have no problem with that.
Voters should take account of candidates’ ages when they go to the polls, and polling indicates that they do. If the two parties nominate the same two, old, unpopular candidates for president again in 2024, that’s a problem with the parties, not with the Constitution.
And officials shouldn’t put parties and voters in awkward situations about their age. They should have some self-respect and retire when they’re too old to perform the tasks required of them. Most of them already do. We don’t need to amend the Constitution for the handful who don’t.