Do you think there should be age limits on politicians?
I think that age limits would be ideal and reasonable -- I mean, as we recently saw, even the Catholic Church has an age limit (80 years old) for the Cardinal electors eligible for selecting a new Pope during a Conclave. I just don't know what the target age should be because people age differently than one another. I also don't know what the mechanism would be for instituting an age limit on politicians. Would it apply to office-holders in all branches of the federal government? How would that work with someone who has a lifetime appointment, like members of the Supreme Court? It seems like there would first need to be term limits across the board, and then maybe some sort of age cap.
But it's clearly unhealthy to the governance of the country for all three branches of the federal government to effectively be a gerontocracy. We've seen the issues with President Biden and now President Trump holding the most powerful office in the world at advanced ages. But I don't think most Americans even realize that the person who is third in line to the Presidency -- the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Chuck Grassley -- will be 92 years old in September. He's been in the Senate since 1981 -- practically my entire life and in Congress since the Ford Administration. And here's an even crazier fact: Grassley, who again is third in line to the Presidency, was first elected to the Iowa state legislature during the Eisenhower Administration (1959)! The president pro tempore is usually the longest-serving Senator in the majority party, which means the person who is third in line to the Presidency (after the Vice President and Speaker of the House) is usually one of the oldest members of Congress. Strom Thurmond was third in line to the Presidency when he was 98 years old (in 2001, just a few months before 9/11 when continuity of government was genuinely threatened). Robert Byrd was third in line when he died at the age of 92 in 2010. It's crazy to think one of the highest-ranking leaders in the federal government is routinely someone north of 90 years old. But that will likely never change because it would require politicians to vote against their own ambitions and self-interest, and that's not something that American political leaders do.
