How old is too old?
Bonus: And the end of hangovers?
The question raised in the above headline has been posed before, especially as it applies to our elected officials. Over the last several days, however, the matter of age in politics has taken on new urgency.
We live in perilous times, and yet it looks like next year’s presidential election will feature two major-party candidates who are in the neighborhood of 80 years old. The median age of a U.S. Senator is 65 and rising. In the House, it has hovered between 57 and 58 over the last decade.
President Biden, at times, seems quite sharp for a man his age. On other occasions, he appears confused, makes misstatements and has difficulty pronouncing his words. He walks unsteadily and is prone to accidents. Biden, 80, has mobility problems and now avoids using the traditional set of stairs on Air Force One in favor of a much shorter set of steps that retracts into the belly of the presidential aircraft.
Biden’s likely opponent, the 77-year-old former President Donald Trump, tries to hide his old age with high energy. According to comedian Noel Casler, who worked for six years with the then-future president on Celebrity Apprentice, Trump routinely snorted Adderall, a prescription amphetamine used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Trump is also known to sniff a lot, even in public. You can draw your own conclusions, but high energy is a scarce commodity when you’re in your late seventies, when tweeting in the middle of the night requires Herculean effort — to say nothing of getting up to use the bathroom without stumbling.
Over at the Capitol, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, experienced a scary moment when he froze inexplicably for 20 seconds at a news conference and had to be helped off the podium by his colleagues. McConnell had fallen earlier this year and suffered a concussion. CNN has reported that McConnell has tumbled multiple times this year.
The wheelchair-bound Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 90, was absent from her job for two months earlier this year because of a bout with shingles and encephalitis. Her absence on the Judiciary Committee caused delays in the confirmation of judges, prompting some Democrats to ask her to resign. She has declined to do so and often appears dazed and confused. Last week, she was asked by a committee chair during a roll call which way she intended to vote and instead read aloud a rambling statement, only to be prompted by a colleague to “Just say aye.”
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, who turns 90 in September, is the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and was just reelected last year to another six-year term. For some perspective, Grassley was first elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 1958 (the year after I was born) and to the U.S. Senate in 1980 when I was still in college and Ronald Reagan dethroned Jimmy Carter. At that time, Reagan, 69, was our oldest elected president.
So what’s the solution here, folks? Do we want to be governed by a body where career longevity is more important than competence? Various remedies have been floated, including age limits on members of Congress or mandatory mental acuity tests. For most of my adult life, I have been opposed to term limits on the grounds that they’re paternalistic measures incompatible with a free society. I’m now reconsidering my opposition.
There are downsides to term limits, most notably that if members of Congress are only allowed to served for relatively brief stints, institutional knowledge is lost. Since there would be no term limits for congressional staff, those unelected professionals would take on added importance.
I propose that senators serve no more than three consecutive six-years terms and House members no more than nine consecutive two-year terms. That’s longer than some would like, but I think it preserves some measure of institutional knowledge while ensuring there will be no more Strom Thurmonds in this world. In case you missed it, Thurman served in the Senate from 1954 to 2003, until he was 100. In his last two years in office, he literally had to be propped up when he was wheeled into the Capitol in the morning. At the end of the day, he was rolled out of the building to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he actually lived when not in the Capitol.
“I don’t know what the magic number is, but I do think that as a general rule, my goodness, when you get into the 80s, it’s time to think about a little relaxation,” Trent Lott, 81, a former Senate majority leader who retired at the spry age of 67 to start his own lobbying firm, told the New York Times (free link). “The problem is, you get elected to a six-year term, you’re in pretty good shape, but four years later you may not be so good.”
Interestingly, Google searches for the word “gerontocracy” skyrocketed after McConnell’s episode. So maybe I’m not alone here?
Synthetic alcohol in the pipeline
A story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Headlined “Enjoy Alcohol, Without the Hangover” (free link), it reports that a London-based company, GABA Labs, “is developing a synthetic alcohol that it says will bring pleasurable effects without hangovers, health problems or slurred speech.”
GABA’s marketing slogan: “CONVIVIALITY, let’s drink to that!” Once the geezers in the Capitol get ahold of that stuff, there will be no stopping them.