Showing their age: Is longevity in U.S. politics really good for America? | Opinion

President Biden’s age has rekindled a debate we hear periodically when candidates for president break some historic age barrier. President Ronald Reagan was the oldest president ever elected at 69, and political opponents raised the age issue during his run for the presidency and when he ran for a second term at age 75, then the nation’s oldest president.

Donald Trump hardly escaped notice when he broke the record as the oldest president. If he were to be elected president in 2024, he would be 77, still a few years younger than Biden who would be a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.

Whether you agree that Biden offers Republicans too many negatives for a 2024 campaign, his presidency chalked up significant achievements addressing climate change, infrastructure funding, COVID relief, just to mention a few. Historians are likely to record his presidency favorably in rescuing the nation from the dysfunctions of the Trump presidency and moving the nation forward on challenges too often kicked down the road by previous presidents.

But that doesn’t get Biden past the issue of having too many birthdays. If he were to be elected in 2024 and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis emerged as the standard bearer, DeSantis would be 46 and young enough to be Biden’s son.

The age factor for Biden is not an issue the witch doctors of campaign commercials would have trouble highlighting with their voodoo expertise these days. Just observe Biden approaching the podium so slowly and speaking so guardedly. It brings back memories of that visit to see Dad in his later retirement years.

And “retirement” is the point. Just how long do public servants, especially presidents, members of Congress and the Supreme Court get to stay in office before they wear out their welcome, or to put it bluntly, just wear out?

Physical challenges that accompany age can affect life-and-death decisions of presidents, as history has recorded. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s physical condition at Yalta prevented him from challenging Stalin as he agreed to hand off Eastern Europe to the Soviets. President Reagan was rumored during his presidency to have his dementia moments.

Could it be that the Founding Fathers didn’t impose term limits on Congress and the Supreme Court because they were living in an age when folks just didn’t live as long as they do today? No need to worry about elected officials staying too long, they’d be dead before any concern for length of tenure surfaced. Well, not so you’d notice in 2023 when too many of our public officials in Washington have enough birthdays to qualify for a senior living center.

The age issue has also caught the attention of political scientists who researched databases of donors and the candidates they support and have arrived at some interesting conclusions about age inequality in both political influence and office-holding.

Adam Bonica and Jacob M. Grumbach, from Stanford University and the University of Washington respectively, studied the increasing age of members of Congress and concluded that Congress is a gerontocracy with too many public officials who are significantly older than most of the adult population. They also found that donors are more likely to give to candidates closer to their age. Since the median dollar in the U.S. campaign finance system come from a 66-year-old donor, which means younger Americans are underrepresented among campaign donors, it is much more difficult for younger candidates to access donations for their campaigns.

When you add the advantage of incumbency to the age equation, you have the perfect storm of gerontocracy. Their most interesting finding is that the Congress of the United States when measured by the average age of its members — 58 for House members and 64 for senators — is the second oldest legislative assembly on the planet. Only Cambodia’s has a higher average age.

Experience is often touted by incumbents as the reason they should be returned to office over and over again. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, just won re-election to his eighth six-year term at age 89. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, is also 89, and it’s not clear she is mentally fit to be serving in the Senate.

Bonica and Grumbach concede that younger candidates must wait their turn for public office, but they recognize that the U.S. suffers from a chronic under-investment in younger Americans and, therefore, we must find ways to support greater representation of the young in politics. Call it idealism or a youthful optimism about the future, Congress could use more of it.

The issue of climate change is a prime example of how older officeholders may not be compelled to take action in mapping out the future generational impact of climate change, given how much of it they will miss. Younger officeholders, on the other hand, can see their own lives mired in the disastrous consequences of climate change, and they are likely to act more decisively than their older colleagues.

Gallup polls show 70% of Americans age 18 to 34 worry about global warming. This compares with 62% of those 35 to 54 and only 56% who are 55 or older.

Guess what group we find heavily represented in Congress? Or just take a look at Idaho’s congressional delegation.

Sen. Mike Crapo, at age 72, has been in the Congress for 24 years — six years in the House and 24 in the Senate.

Sen. Jim Risch, who will turn 80 in May, has served in the Senate for 14 years.

Rep. Mike Simpson, at age 73, has been in the U.S. House for 24 years. Rep. Russ Fulcher is 61 and has been in Congress for only four years, so he gets a hall pass on the issue and is now old enough to drive compared to the others.

I can already hear the defense of these lifers. It’s all about seniority. No matter how old they are or how long they’ve been in office, they bring the bacon back for Idaho. First, that doesn’t work so well when you are not in the majority and that ebbs and flows with the nation’s politics. Second, and more important, our elected representatives in Washington cast thousands of votes over their careers and the system is so rigged today that it is nigh impossible to know how they voted and whether it is really in the interests of Idaho seniors, children, students, shoppers, patients, borrowers, savers, and the list goes on.

For every one of those constituencies, there are powerful lobbies influencing the voting patterns of our elected officials. The interests of those lobbyists do not always coincide with the priorities and values of Idaho citizens. New and fresh faces in the chambers make it more difficult for lobbyists to capture their voting switches. Forget the argument that a big, bad bureaucracy will take over when all that institutional wisdom from the lifers is lost. Lobbyists in D.C. aren’t called the fourth branch of government for nothing. They earn the title by calling the shots on too many votes.

Unfortunately, this is a problem without easy solutions. Term limits for members of Congress would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed by two-thirds of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states. Campaign finance limits to keep campaigns more affordable have been decimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision. State parties are working to close and further restrict who can vote in their primaries, making it harder for younger voters to participate.

I suppose it’s going to take voters to show that old age or length in office is not necessarily a winning electoral strategy. It worked in the 2022 midterms against election deniers. Maybe we need to talk more about aging deniers in Congress.