Welcome to the Gerontocracy
Welcome to the Gerontocracy: 12 Signs America Is Being Run by Whoever Can Still Read the Teleprompter Without Bifocals Nina Totenberg is 81. Chuck Grassley is 91. The last two presidents were the two oldest in American history. Somewhere in a nursing home in suburban Virginia, the median age of the United States Senate is quietly outliving the median age of the country it governs by a solid 25 years. This is not a democracy. This is an assisted-living facility with nuclear codes. Here are 12 humorous observations about the gerontocracy running the free world, generously footnoted so nobody's lawyer has a stroke — because at this point, stroke risk is basically a congressional job requirement. 1. Congress Is Now Older Than Most of the Buildings It Meets In The 119th Congress clocked in at an average age of 58.9 years old, making it the third-oldest Congress since 1789. For context, the median American is 39.1. Congress isn't just out of touch with the youth vote — it's out of touch with the youth century. The Silent Generation Isn't Silent. It's Just Not Retiring. Two dozen sitting members of Congress belong to the Silent Generation, and their average age is 83.8 — with more than half of them running for reelection anyway. Silent, apparently, refers to how quietly they plan to never, ever leave. 2. Senator Chuck Grassley Was Already a Senator Before Cable TV Had Remote Controls First elected in 1980, Grassley turns 95 if he finishes his current term — closing in on Strom Thurmond's all-time Senate longevity record. He is currently third in line for the presidency, which means the nuclear football is one bad flu season away from being handed to a man who remembers rationing. Meanwhile, the Youngest Senator Wasn't Even in the Senate When Grassley Chaired His Third Committee The Senate's median age sits at 64, a full generation removed from the House's median of 57 — itself no spring chicken. The gap between the two chambers is basically the distance between "retirement party" and "retirement party, part two." 3. The Supreme Court Has Tenure. Literally, Forever, Tenure. Unlike Congress, the Supreme Court has no term limits, no mandatory retirement age, and no exit ramp except the one nobody wants to talk about at Thanksgiving. Justices can, and do, serve into their late 80s, which is why every Supreme Court retirement announcement now doubles as a national news event and a family intervention. Nina Totenberg and the Beat Reporters Who've Covered Five Different "Youngest Justices" NPR's Nina Totenberg, 81, has covered the Supreme Court since before some sitting justices were born — a fact National Review recently noted with the kind of bemusement usually reserved for finding out your GPS is still using a 2004 map. 4. America Elected Its Two Oldest Presidents Back to Back, on Purpose, Twice The two most recent occupants of the Oval Office are, by a wide margin, the oldest presidents in American history. This wasn't a fluke. This was a choice. Twice. 5. Term Limits Advocates Have a Better Approval Rating Than Congress Itself Roughly 80% of Americans, across party lines, support age limits for elected officials, according to polling cited by term-limit advocacy groups. Congress's response to this overwhelming bipartisan consensus has been to quietly change the subject, the same way it's been changing the subject since the Ford administration. "We Don't Think Senility Is the Problem. We Think Incumbency Is." That's the argument from U.S. Term Limits CEO Nick Tomboulides, who told NBC News that senility is merely the symptom of a much older disease: winning uncontested elections for four decades straight. 6. The Global Gerontocracy Club Has an Even Longer Waitlist America isn't even the worst offender. Cameroon's Paul Biya has ruled since 1982 and is currently serving an eighth term into his 90s. China's ruling Politburo Standing Committee has spent decades being led by men in their 70s and 80s advising a population with a median age barely half that. The Soviet Union ran an entire late-stage empire on a rotating cast of dying general secretaries — an era historians now politely call "the Geriatric Handoff." Iran, Cuba, and the International Fraternal Order of "We'll Retire When We're Ready (Never)" From Tehran to Havana, the pattern repeats: revolutionary leaders who seized power in their 30s and simply never scheduled an exit meeting. Somewhere there is an actuarial table quietly panicking on behalf of several national constitutions. 7. Wealth Follows Age, and Boomers Are Not Splitting the Bill The generation currently running Congress also happens to be sitting on the largest share of American household wealth, while younger generations inherit the debt, the diagnoses, and the group chat about it. Gerontocracy, it turns out, is just inheritance with better lighting and a Senate parking spot. 8. The 25th Amendment Exists for the President. Congress Gave Itself No Equivalent. If a member of Congress becomes incapacitated, there is, per constitutional experts, no formal mechanism to remove them — only the theoretical, never-used option of a two-thirds expulsion vote. In practice, the plan is: hope, staff intervention, and extremely patient constituents. 9. "Experience" and "Seniority" Are Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting as Excuses Ask any octogenarian lawmaker why they're running again, and the answer is always some version of "seniority helps my district." Somewhere, a 34-year-old freshman representative is taking notes on how to turn "I've been here since Reagan" into a campaign slogan. 10. The Youngest Member of Congress Could Legally Be the Oldest One's Grandchild Congress's lone Gen Z member serves alongside colleagues old enough to have voted for his grandparents. The two of them presumably do not share a group chat, an aesthetic, or a working definition of "going viral." 11. Retirement Announcements Now Come with Career Retrospectives Longer Than Some Careers When a senator who's served since the Carter administration finally announces they won't seek reelection, the news cycle treats it like a state funeral with a Q&A. Several such announcements have already happened this cycle — while the announcer stays in office for another two years anyway. 12. Nobody in Charge of Fixing This Is Under 70 The single funniest fact about the American gerontocracy is structural: the people with the actual power to pass age limits, term limits, or mandatory retirement rules for Congress and the Supreme Court are, overwhelmingly, the people those rules would apply to. Asking this Congress to legislate itself into retirement is like asking a cat to schedule its own vet appointment. Disclaimer: This is a satirical piece intended for entertainment purposes. Ages, dates, and quotes are drawn from public reporting; the jokes are not. No senators, justices, or nonagenarian committee chairs were harmed in the making of this article, though several may need to sit down after reading it. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article
