In the wake of such things as the grifter’s even more erratic than usual behavior and Mitch McConnell’s carefully managed return to the Senate, my social media produced another deluge of demands for putting upper age limits on public office. I just flew home through the San Francisco Airport, noticed they’d named the international terminal after Dianne Feinstein, and couldn’t help thinking how embarrassing and disastrous her last years were.
It is certainly true that some people who should have retired from their jobs much earlier keep hanging on. But I’m still opposed to age limits on most jobs, for one very basic reason: Human beings don’t age uniformly.
Nancy Pelosi was the most effective Speaker of the House the US has seen in decades. She pulled back from leadership posts and is now retiring from Congress, but she was very effective throughout her years in office. I don’t always agree with her, but I cannot deny her ability.
Nancy Pelosi is 86, two years older than Mitch McConnell.
The NY Times had a piece this week about the composer Thea Musgrave, whose opera Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel, will premiere next year. The article starts with her working with a bassoonist on another piece and commenting that she is still learning.
Musgrave is 98.
I’ve just been at a writers retreat where the members ranged in age from 50s to 80s, with most of us in our 70s. All of us are still writing, all of us still smart. With the exception of the youngest of us, all have a few health issues that we pay close attention to, but none of them keep us from writing.
Of course, again with the exception of our youngest member, none of us have day jobs anymore. None of us want day jobs, but all of us want to write and publish our work.
In general, we are now producing the best work of our lives, because we are smart and have a lot of experience and both understand how to write and why we want to do it. What we do now is valuable whether it ever wins a prize or makes the best seller list.
I know people in their 50s who are old and stuck in their ways, people in their 60s with enough health issues to prevent them from doing a full time job. I know people in their 80s and 90s whose judgment is impeccable and who have fresh ideas. We don’t all age at the same pace.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the biggest problem in politics isn’t that we have lot of old people in Congress; it’s that we have a lot of bad people there. Age limits won’t solve that problem.
So what will?
I can think of several things that would be highly useful. The most obvious is to get as much money as we can out of politics. Obviously the Supreme Court made a disastrous decision in 2010 in Citizens United, a complicated case that opened the doors to the vast sums spent on elections.
The merging of money with speech, not to mention the merging of corporations with people, has undermined our elections.
Given that Citizens United was a [mis]interpretation of the First Amendment, getting rid of its effect is complicated. I suspect we need a combination of a court ruling overturning it and some significant legislation that markedly restricts money in politics.
Another way of reducing money in politics would be to prohibit members of Congress from trading in stocks. I suspect that if we drew a firm enough line between public service and making money, many people might serve in Congress for a few terms and then leave because they wanted to make more money.
Let’s contrast Congress members to another set of public servants: judges. In the federal system, judges are appointed. And while they can have investments, they are expected to step back from cases in which their personal financial interest might cause a conflict. (I note that this doesn’t apply to the Supreme Court, which is not subject to the ethics rules of other judges, but should be.)
As a general rule, judges don’t get rich while serving in their jobs. They get paid decently. This seems to me to be an appropriate norm. Public service should pay decently, but should not provide room for people to get rich.
Some of the ways elected officials get rich are blatantly corrupt. The recent Pro Publica investigative reporting into Susan Collins is just one example of at minimum a messy situation, and there have been others much worse. But there is plenty of legal money being spent as well.
Another obvious solution is to end gerrymandering. States like Arizona have had independent nonpartisan bodies draw their districts for years, which means that the state had some Democratic representatives even when it was at its most Republican.
Expanding the size of the House of Representatives would also help enormously. Fair and small districts would mean we the people could have a lot more influence over our members of Congress.
I’m not a big fan of term limits, mostly because I think they sweep out good people along with the bad, but term limits are definitely better than limits tied to an artificial number like age.
By the way, while I’m opposed to age limits in other professions as well as politics, I don’t object to more stringent medical and fitness exams for people in jobs that require high levels of competence (airline pilots, air traffic controllers, and such). That makes sense.
Age alone just isn’t a reliable indicator of who can do a job and age limits alone won’t fix our political problems.
Let’s work on the real problems.